INTRODUCTION TO MICAH. § I. THE BOOK OF MICAH. I. The Text. The book of Micah stands sixth in the list of the Minor Prophets as given in the Hebrew Bible, but third as found in 6. The text has come down to us in a bad state of corruption. Of the Minor Prophets, Hosea alone has a worse text. In the following commentary, it has been found necessary to make more than eighty corrections of the text as found in M, in order to secure satisfactory sense. Almost half of the errors are in chs. 1 and 2, while chs. 4 and 5 are remarkably free from them. I In the correction of M, G is of the most value. It offers a larger number of textual variants than all of the remaining versions combined. In many cases the text presupposed by 's rendering is superior to . More than one-third of the emendations here adopted are based upon 6. help, being chiefly dependent upon 6. made on the basis of, apart from G. each. The characteristics of the various versions of Micah are in affords relatively little Only seven corrections are and Aq. furnish one general the same as in the case of Amos and Hosea. Cf. H.AH., clxxiii-clxxvi. Certainly's rendering of the Minor Prophets as a whole seems to be the work of one translator throughout. 4 The errors of are those which commonly appear in the transmission of texts, viz., wrong division of words, e. g., 210 69; dittography, e. g., 23 51 610; haplography, e. g., 51.71; wrong pointing, e. g., 15. 9 310 58; confusion of similar consonants, e. g., 11. 125 74; transposition of words or phrases, e. g., 24; confusion of suffixes, e. g., 2o 719; and deliberate theological change, e. g., 15. But the source of some corruptions is inexplicable, e. g., 73. The preponderance of errors in chs. 1-3 is due partly to the large number of proper names in this material, partly to the greater age of this portion of the prophecy and probably also in part to the denunciatory character of the message which later editors sought to soften. 2. The Style. The style of Micah, as revealed in chs. 1-3, is direct and forceful. It is characterised by rapidity of movement, picturesque phraseology, vivid description and boldness of utterance. It reflects clearness of vision, keen insight and profound feeling. At first sight, this seems inconsistent with the indulgence in paronomasia found in 110 ff.; but the Hebrew prophets were able to couch their most biting denunciations in this form. Cf. Is. 316 .. The logical development within each prophecy in chs. 1-3 is also admirable. Not only so, but there is an evident logical progress in the succession of the various prophecies constituting these chapters. Upon leaving this section of the book, the atmosphere changes. With few exceptions, the style becomes less forceful and direct. It loses in vividness and passion. The contrast is something like that existing between Isaiah, chs. 40 ff., and the genuine utterances of Isaiah. The movement is calm and placid and the tone reflective rather than denunciatory. But there is greater variety and unevenness of style in chs. 4-6 than in chs. 1-3. 3. Poetic Form. That the book of Micah is in poetic form is indisputable. Yet relatively little attention has been bestowed upon this phase of its study. Ewald (1840) contributed a strophical analysis of the book. Francis Brown (JBL., 1890, pp. 71–82) used Micah, chs. 1-3 and 711-20, to illustrate the value of poetic form as a consideration in the determination of the composite character of a writing. In 1891, Elhorst presented a strophic reorganisation of the prophecy involving revolution ary transpositions and intended as a defence of the unity of the book. D. H. Müller, in Die Propheten in ihrer ursprünglichen Form (1896), treated chs. 3, 56-14 and 7 to an application of his complicated theory of strophe, antistrophe, responsion, inclusion, concatenation, etc.. Sievers included ch. 1 in his Studien zur hebräischen Metrik (1901), where he showed too great respect toward M. François Ladame reconstructed chs. 4 and 5, according to the theory of Müller and Zenner, in the Revue de theologie et de philosophie for 1902. Condamin, belonging to the same school of metricists, would place 212. 13 after 46; see RB., XI (1902), 383-6. Duhm, in EB., III (1902), 3800, arranged 39-12 poetically. Marti makes the poetic and strophic form the basis of his commentary (1904). Löhr presents 31-4. 9-12 as a literary and poetic unit in ZDMG., LXI (1907), 3-6. Sievers, in his Alttestamentliche Miscellen, published in Berichte über die Verhandlungen der Königl. Sächsischen Gesellschaft zu Wissenschaften, LIX (1907), 76–109, applies his metrical system to the whole book of Micah. Here he casts veneration for to the winds and, on the basis of Marti's critical conclusions, reconstructs the text in accordance with the requirements of his system. The conclusions concerning the poetic form of Micah which are incorporated in the following commentary have already appeared in J. M. P. Smith's Strophic Structure of the Book of Micah, published in Old Testament and Semitic Studies in Memory of William Rainey Harper, II (1908), 415-438, and also in AJSL., XXIV (1908), 187-208. Since that publication there has appeared P. Haupt's Critical Notes on Micah, AJSL., July and October, 1910, containing a strophical reconstruction of the text. But Haupt's rearrangement is so subjective and arbitrary as almost to warrant the suspicion that he regards the book of Micah as a quarry from which stones may be hewed for any kind of a building. B. Duhm has also published a poetical version of Micah in Die zwölf Propheten in den Versmassen der Urschrift übersetzt (1910); in this too much insistence is laid upon the necessity of four-lined strs.. No attempt is made here to stretch the text of Micah upon the Procrustaean bed of a metrical system. Neither Bickell, Grimme, Sievers nor Rothstein seems as yet to have evolved a system that does not do violence to the text. In the present stage of metrical study, certainly no existing system can be accepted as a safe guide to the nature and form of Hebrew poetry. The reconstruction here presented aims to follow the guidance of the parallelism and the logic. On the basis of the former, lines are discovered which are of approximately equal length, measured by the number of tones, or accents, in the line. The same length of line persists |