Testaments: 5 - What Is Required
When the mountains melt and the valleys split and flow,
What might descends in silence clothed in flame?
All dull stone and glittery pride the same.
Your golden calves now well and truly swallowed.
The poor lie trampled after all the merchants go.
Their future devoured, their attention sold in shame.
But from a working town who will call the name?
Can a peace defeat what the war-born know?
Do not with weighted scales cheat the weak.
Show mercy not in word but in your small deeds.
Walk humbly without being center of the show.
No killing, no chanting, no doublespeak.
Rather take your idle hands and fucking lift where there is need.
This is the only way. The only way we grow.
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Book of Micah
**Estimated Date of Composition: **
circa 740–700 BCE
**Form: **
Prophetic poetry
Context:
Micah prophesied in Judah during the reigns of Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah—roughly contemporaneous with Isaiah. All these dudes, hanging out, prophesying…who’s doing that today? Like some influencers? I feel like we’ve lost something there. Micah’s oracles denounce social injustice, especially among the urban elite, while offering visions of messianic peace centered not in Jerusalem, but in Bethlehem. The text alternates between doom and deliverance, with scholars noting the deliberate juxtaposition of divine wrath and pastoral hope. God can get angry, buuut he’s chill if you are. Micah 6:8—“What does the Lord require of you…”—has become a touchstone of biblical ethics. And, as far as biblical ethics go, they’re not too shabby. Micah likely underwent multiple stages of redaction, as it contains both pre-exilic and post-exilic layers of material.
References:
• Waltke, Bruce K. A Commentary on Micah. Eerdmans, 2007.
• Ben Zvi, Ehud. *Micah (Forms of the Old Testament Literature)*. Eerdmans, 2000.