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)
