Tuesday, May 26, 2020

J.R. Dummelow on Micah 3:12 and the Contingent Nature of Biblical Prophecy



Therefore shall Zion for your sake be plowed as a field, and Jerusalem shall become heaps, and the mountain of the house as the high places of the forest. (Mic 3:12)

In Stephen Smoot's Joel Kramer Vs. The Bible and Joseph Smith (an article I helped research) we read the following about Mic 3:12:

[I]n Micah 3:12, the prophet predicts the inevitable downfall of Jerusalem. This passage provides the only unambiguous instance in the Hebrew Bible of a prophetic message being specifically referred to in another prophetic collection, for it is discussed in Jeremiah 26:18-19. Jerusalem, however, had not fallen; but this does not mean that Micah was dismissed or condemned as a false prophet on the grounds that his prophecy had not been fulfilled, as Kramer’s reading would require. Rather, the claim is made that Hezekiah’s repentance had led Yahweh to change his mind and spare the city, and such a claim cannot readily be refuted. With his commitment to biblical inerrancy and sufficiency, Kramer is certainly in no position to dispute it.

J.R. Dummelow, commenting on this verse and it being a witness to the contingent nature of prophecy, wrote:

12. cp. Jer 2617-19. The people of Jeremiah’s time, angered by his prophecies of disaster, wished to put him to death. Some of the elders reminded them that, when Micah denounced a like judgment, Hezekiah, instead of killing him, repented at his words, and so averted the disaster. This implies that the religious minds of that time recognized how true prophecy is always conditional, and how the fulfilment of its predictions is conditional on the attitude men take to them. (J.R. Dummelow, A Commentary on the Holy Bible [London: Macmillan and Co., 1909], 581)