Micah 3:12 - Exposition

This is the prophecy quoted by the elders to King Jehoiakim ( Jeremiah 26:17 , etc.). It may have been delivered before Hezekiah's time originally, and repeated in his reign, when it was productive of a reformation. The denunciation is a mourn-fill contrast to the announcement in Micah 2:12 ; but it was never completely fulfilled, being, like all such judgments, conditioned by circumstances. Therefore … for your sake. For the crimes of rulers, priests, and prophets. Shall Zion … be ploughed as a field. Three localities are specified which destruction shall overtake Zion, Jerusalem, and the temple. Zion means that part of the city where stood the royal palace. The prophecy relates primarily to the destruction of the city by the Chaldeans, when, as Jeremiah testifies ( Lamentations 5:18 ), Zion was desolate and foxes walked upon it. The expression in the text may be hyperbolical, but we know that the ploughing up of the foundations of captured cities is often alluded to. Thus Horace, 'Carm.,' 1.16, 20—

"... imprimeretque muris

Hostile aratrum exercitus insolens ."

(Comp. 'Propert.,' 3.7, 41; and for the whole passage, Isaiah 32:13 , Isaiah 32:14 .) "The general surface of Mount Zion descends steeply eastwards into the Tyropoeon and Kidron, and southwards into the Valley of Hinnom. The whole of the hill here is under cultivation, and presents a most literal fulfilment of Micah's prophecy". "From the spot on which I stood," says Dr. Porter, "I saw the plough at work in the little fields that now cover the site of Zion". Jerusalem shall become heaps. The city proper shall become heaps of ruins ( Jeremiah 9:11 ; Nehemiah 2:17 ; Nehemiah 4:2 ) Septuagint, ὡς ὀπωροφυλάκιον ἔσται , "as a storehouse for fruits, " as in Psalms 78:1-72 . (79) 1. The mountain of the house. The mountain on which the temple was built, Mount Moriah, and therefore the temple itself, no longer mentioned as the Lord's dwelling place. As the high places of the forest; or, as wooded heights, returning, as it were, to the wild condition in which it lay when Abraham offered his sacrifice thereon. In the time of the Maccabees, after its profanation by tile heathen, the account speaks of shrubs growing in the courts as in a forest or in one of the mountains (1 Macc. 4:38). Such was to be the fate of the temple in which they put their trust and made their boast.