In the introductory section of his new commentary on Micah (EP Books, 2010) Dale Ralph Davis illustrates the problems of scholarly study and commentary on Old (and New) Testament texts.
I can’t think of anyone whose commentaries and sermons produce so many laugh out loud moments from someone who doesn’t tell jokes. Davis just has a knack for exposing the absurdities of human nature.
Get your hands on any of his books, and listen to him speak, if you get the opportunity.
This introduction demonstrates how well Davis has engaged the dull, boring and the complicated, while the outline of Micah that follows this introduction (get the book) shows his skill as a scholar who is engaging, interesting and able to cut through complexity and engage your understanding.
Did Micah leave us Micah?
My father served as a United Presbyterian pastor from 1927 until his retirement in 1971. Imagine that shortly after his retirement he had written a brief synopsis of his ministry, indicating the years served and then a sketch of the locations of his congregations: about four years at Sheakleyville, Pennsylvania: nine months in Beaver, Pennsylvania: thirteen more years in his first charge in Sheakleyville, Pennsylvania: three and a half years in Newton, Kansas in the mid-1940s; eleven years in Harrisville, Pennsylvania; and eleven years in Aliquippa, Pennsylvania. Imagine too that we had bumped into one of my father’s former parishioners who remembered how deeply moved he had been by a. sermon my father had preached from Ephesians 1.
How would the average Old Testament critic tend to look at data like that? First, he might say that it’s very rare for any pastor to stay only nine months in a charge – that piece must he an intrusion: it looks very suspicious, after all, because he went back, allegedly, to his previous pastorate. That is very unusual, not likely. Instead, he must have simply had a long ministry (maybe eighteen years) in Sheakleyville. Second almost all his pastorates seem to have been in western Pennsylvania. This means it’s improbable that he had one in Kansas for three years or more; after all, who would move 1,200 miles from western Pennsylvania while the Second World War was going on and certain wartime restrictions were in place? Third, last two pastorates are said to consist of eleven years each. That is suspicious. How often would that actually happen? More likely, what took place was that there was only one pastorate of eleven years (either my father’s memory was fuzzy or some of his friends may have tinkered with his written summary). Fourth, sadly enough, my father never preached from the Old Testament. Well, that one fellow had been so impressed with a sermon on Ephesians 1, and that’s in the New Testament, so obviously my father never preached from the Old! Our critic then concludes that, contrary to the written summary, it is likely that my father had a ministry of perhaps thirty years, all in Western Pennsylvania – contrary to the explicit testimony he had been given.
There’s a reason for this bit of foolishness. Critics tend to deal with Micah and other prophetic books in the same way. We have Micah’s genuine prophecies in chapters 1 – 3 – well, except for the promise of 2:12-13 (Fohrer) or half a dozen interpolations that have also wormed their way in (Wolff). Chapters 4 – 5 obviously cannot be from Micah because they consist of promises and we know (from the episode in Jer. 26:18) that Micah was remembered for his message of judgment hence he couldn’t have spoken the positive messages in chapters 4 – 5. Chapters 4 – 5 presuppose the fall of Jerusalem (4:8), the exile and dispersion (4:6-7); and the demise of the Davidic dynasty (15:1) – one couldn’t speak of such things unless they had already taken place (i.e., there’s no such thing as ‘predictive’ prophecy) For the same reason the prophecy of 4:1-5 could not have arisen until after the rebuilding of the temple in the postexilic period, 200 years after Micah’s own time (Wolff). The bits and pieces in chapters 6 and 7 come from the 400s BC from various groups of prophets; scholars cannot be very sure how they originated – the one thing they are certain of is that they did not come from Micah. So chapters 1 – 3 contain the only genuine preaching we have from Micah – except, of course, for later additions that have crept in even there.
Read a critical discussion on the book of Micah. See if it doesn’t read like pages of chaotic guesswork. After summarizing scholarly study of Micah, Brevard Childs concludes that ‘the growing confusion over conflicting theories of composition has increasingly buried the book in academic debris’. One can hardly blame folk for being turned off towards the Old Testament: scholars have done their best to make it dull, boring and complicated.
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