Micah Is Saved by Jeremiah
Deuteronomy 18:14-22 describes
what a prophet is supposed to be able to do: The criteria for distinguishing
between a false prophet and an authentic one is the prophet’s ability to
accurately predict the future. In other words, if what a prophet says will
happen comes true, then they’re legit.
There are some practical problems
with this criteria. The main one is that if a prophet foretells doom, then
having to wait until after the doom arrives (or doesn’t) to know whether or not
they’re legitimate is a bit of a bummer. In practical terms, a prophet’s
legitimacy becomes something that future generations, not the prophet’s
contemporaries, get to decide. The book of Micah offers an important biblical
example of this.
Writing in the latter part of the
eighth century BCE, when the Neo-Assyrian Empire is coming to destroy
Jerusalem, Micah prophecies that the city will be destroyed, saying, “Zion will
be plowed like a field, Jerusalem will become a heap of rubble, the temple hill
a mound overgrown with thickets” (3:12). He is foretelling that Jerusalem will
be destroyed, just like the capital of northern Israel, Samaria, was destroyed
a short time before.
It turns out, though, that
Jerusalem is not destroyed in Micah’s lifetime or any time in the next century.
Anyone living in Micah’s time would have believed him to be a false prophet according
to the criteria set down in Deuteronomy 18.
But the story has an interesting
twist. More than a hundred years later, at the beginning of the sixth century
BCE, the prophet Jeremiah found himself about to be executed for prophesying
the destruction Jerusalem at the hands of the Babylonians—a message that was
considered by King Zedekiah’s officials to be treasonous. However, Jeremiah 26:16-18
says that the prophet’s execution is halted when some gathered elders recall
that Micah prophesied the same thing.
In this way, a later generation
retroactively legitimized Micah’s prophetic career by finding a new way to interpret
his words. Micah had been speaking about the crisis of the Neo-Assyrian empire,
but Jeremiah’s audience found it more helpful to apply his words to the
Babylonian crisis of a different period. And lo and behold, the Babylonians do
in fact destroy Jerusalem in Jeremiah’s lifetime. (Jennifer Garcia Bashaw and
Aaron Higashi, Serving Up Scripture: How to Interpret the Bible for Yourself
and Others [Minneapolis: Broadleaf Books, 2026], 144-45)
