Micah 1:8-16

Lament over the fall of Judah, 8-16.

The sins of the south (Micah 1:5) demand the punishment of Judah. The judgment is already present to the vision of the prophet, and in Micah 1:8-16 he gives expression to his grief over the fall of the southern kingdom. In a series of plays upon their names he pictures in 10-15 the fate awaiting the cities and villages in the south. In 16 he calls upon Zion to mourn, because her children have gone into exile.

The speaker in Micah 1:8 is the prophet as an individual, not the nation with which the prophet may identify himself. He bewails the calamity that has befallen Samaria, in part because he sympathizes with the inhabitants of the north as fellow Israelites, but chiefly because he realizes the danger threatening his native state (Micah 1:9), “for it is come even unto Judah; it reacheth unto the gate of my people, even to Jerusalem.” Micah was a native of Judah, hence it is but natural that he should enter with deeper compassion into the experiences of his own people. In a similar manner, Hosea, a native of Israel, feels more deeply for the north than Amos, a native of Judah.

Go stripped and naked This is to be understood not in the sense of being stripped of all clothing and entirely naked, but in the sense of barefooted and stripped of the upper garment (compare Isaiah 20:2). This act was a symbol both of mourning and of exile; by it the prophet gives expression to his grief, and at the same time seeks to exhibit the fate which the nation must suffer.

Dragons,… owls Better, R.V., “jackals,… ostriches.” The long piteous cry of the jackal, which Riehm describes as a “heart-rending wail, sometimes like the whimpering and the loud cry of children,” and which in its penetration is “suggestive of a lost soul,” and the “fearful screech” of the ostrich, a “peculiar call, now a shrill outcry, now a low moan,” aptly describe the mournful wail of the grief-stricken prophet (for similar comparisons see Job 30:29; Isaiah 38:14; Isaiah 59:11).