Micah 1:1-2 The word of the LORD that came to Micah the Morasthite in the days of Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah… This was a place in the Shepbelah, or range of low hills which lie between the hill country of Judah and the Philistine plain. It is the opposite exposure from the wilderness of Tekoa, some seventeen miles away across the watershed. As the home of Amos is bare and desert, so the home of Micah is fair and fertile. The irregular chalk hills are separated by broad glens, in which the soil is alluvial and red, with room for cornfields on either side of the perennial, or almost perennial streams. The olive groves on the braes are finer than either those of the plain below or of the Judaean table land above. There is herbage for cattle. Bees murmur everywhere, larks are singing, and although today you may wander in the maze of hills for hours without meeting a man, or seeing a house, you are never out of sight of the traces of human habitation, and seldom beyond the sound of the human voice — shepherds and ploughmen calling to their flocks and to each other across the glens. There are none of the conditions, or of the occasions, of a large town. But, like the south of England, the country is one of villages and homesteads, breeding good yeomen — men satisfied and in love with their soil, yet borderers with a fair outlook and a keen vigilance and sensibility. The Shephelah is sufficiently detached from the capital and body of the land to beget in her sons an independence of mind and feeling, but so much upon the edge of the open world as to endue them at the same time with that sense of the responsibilities of warfare, which the national statesmen, aloof and at ease in Zion, could not possibly have shared. Upon one of the westmost terraces of the Shephelah, nearly a thousand feet above the sea, lay Moresheth itself. (Geo. Adam Smith, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: The word of the LORD that came to Micah the Morasthite in the days of Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah, which he saw concerning Samaria and Jerusalem. |
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