Books: Stories of the Prophets
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Isaac Landman >> Stories of the Prophets
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"Woe, Assyria, rod of mine anger,
The staff in whose hand is mine indignation.
Against an impious nation am I wont to send him.
And against the people of my wrath I give him charge,
To take spoil and gather booty,
And to tread them down like the mire in the streets.
But he--not so doth he plan;
And his heart--not so doth it purpose.
For destruction is in his heart,
And to cut off nations not a few.
For he saith, By the strength of my hand have I done it,
And by my wisdom, for I have discerned it;
And I have removed the bounds of thy peoples,
And I have robbed their treasuries,
And like a mighty man I have brought down those who sit enthroned.
And my hand hath seized, as on a nest,
The riches of the peoples.
And as one gathers eggs that are unguarded,
I, indeed, have carried off all the earth."
To this boasting of Assyria, God answers, speaking through Isaiah:
"Before me is thy rising up and thy lying down,
Thy going out and thy coming in.
I know thy raging against me
And thine arrogance hath come to my ears.
Therefore I will put my ring through thy nose,
And my bridle between thy lips,
And will make thee return,
By the way in which thou hast come."
Not long after this, while Sennacherib was worshiping in the temple of
Nisroch, in Nineveh, he was attacked by his own sons and killed, and
Esarhaddon, one of his sons, succeeded him on the throne of Assyria.
CHAPTER IX.
_The Fruit of His Labor._
Blessed is the man whose toil and striving of a lifetime bring
results, even though he, himself, does not live to see them!
Thrice blessed is the man, the fruit of whose labor is garnered while
he is among the living, to see and enjoy it!
The prophet Isaiah was a thrice-blessed man. Although no one knows
where or how he died, every one knows where and how he lived, and how
his life was fruitful in blessings for his people.
He saw kings come and go on the throne of Judah. He passed through
many crises in the history of his country. He experienced many woes
because of his patriotic devotion to the welfare of his land and
people.
But through it all he remained, uncomplainingly, staunch in his faith
and true to his God. He believed, implicitly, in the justness of God
and, therefore, in His demand of righteousness as the standard of
living for the people. Isaiah's own strength, in time of trial and
tribulation, came from his trust in God; and that same trust he urged
upon Jerusalem and Judah in his day and, through his discourses, upon
all men, for all time.
Thus it was given Isaiah to see the fruit of his labor in the peace
and prosperity of Judah during the remainder of his life which he,
undoubtedly, spent in peace with his family in his home in Jerusalem.
It is no wonder that he conceived the ideal of a time of universal
peace, in which God shall be the God of all the nations, an era in
which all peoples shall come to Him, and believe in Him, and follow in
His law, and live such just and righteous lives that there would be an
end to war in all the earth:
"It shall come to pass, in the end of days,
That the mountain of the Lord's house shall be established at the
top of the mountains,
And it shall be exalted above the hills;
And peoples shall flow unto it.
And many nations shall go and say,
'Come ye, and let us go up to the mountains of the Lord,
And to the house of the God of Jacob;
And he will teach us of His ways,
And we will walk in His paths.'
For out of Zion shall go forth instruction,
And the word of the Lord from Jerusalem,
And He shall judge between the nations,
And arbitrate for many peoples;
And they shall beat their swords into plowshares,
And their spears into pruning hooks;
Nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
Neither shall they learn war any more."
THE COMMONER
CHAPTER I.
_His Awakening._
Sloping down from the Judean hills toward the plain of Philistia and
the Mediterranean Sea is the Shefelah, or Lowlands, a section of
Palestine, far-famed for its stretches of rich farm lands, vineyards
and olive groves.
These foothills were once the constant battlefield on which the
Israelites from the hill country and the Philistines from the plain
struggled for mastery; but, since the days of King Amaziah, who
conquered Philistia soon after he came to the throne of Judah, in the
year 798, the Shefelah, far away from the political turmoils in
Samaria and Jerusalem, was one of the most peaceful and richest farm
sections in Israel or Judah.
Up in Samaria, in the year 734, Hoshea, son of Elah, had played the
traitor and had bent his head to Tiglath-Pileser, the Assyrian
conqueror. Up in Jerusalem, Ahaz, son of Jotham, had acted the coward
and had slipped his neck under the Assyrian yoke. But down in the
Shefelah, on the lower highlands, politics and political intrigues
played little part in the lives of the humble peasant folk.
Numerous towns and villages dotted the Shefelah, especially on the
highway running northeast from Gaza, in Philistia, to Jerusalem, in
Judah. These towns and villages were the centers where the neighboring
farmers gathered at set times and where the many daily wage earners
lived all the time.
Rich and fertile sections like the Shefelah were the backbone, the
strength and the power of Israel and Judah. While the high and mighty
princes and merchants lived in the capitals and squandered their
wealth, the simple and hard-working farm folk and wage earners made up
the bone and muscle of the population, raised the necessities of life
and, in times of need, furnished the sinews of war.
Yet, notwithstanding the fertility of the Shefelah, its rich fields
and olive groves, its plentiful and well-watered pasture lands, the
farmers in the entire section, had to live from hand to mouth. Though
they labored hard at their toil, they were, in fact, poor and unable
to lay aside anything for a rainy day.
It was very difficult to become reconciled to such a condition of
affairs. No one seemed interested enough to fathom the reason for it,
except a certain young peasant, named Micah, who had a home in the
town of Moresheth, and was the proud possessor of several well-paying
olive groves and vineyards in the vicinity.
Micah's interest in the population was aroused, one day, when the
widow of one of his neighbors came to him for advice. Her husband had
owned a farm, adjoining one of Micah's pastures, on which there was a
heavy mortgage. Now that the head of the family was gone, the merchant
in Jerusalem, who held the mortgage, threatened to eject the widow and
the children, because they could neither pay the amount borrowed nor
the interest due thereon.
The sturdy young peasant, brought up in a home of severe simplicity,
where gentleness and kindness were taught and practiced, pitied the
woman and her children in their sad plight and loaned her the needed
interest payment to stave off ejection from her home. Thereafter, he
looked after her family until the oldest son was able to manage his
own affairs.
Talking to some of his day-laborers he discovered a very amazing
situation. He found that most of them had, at one time or another,
owned their farms, but had lost possession of them through lawsuits,
in which mortgage holders from Jerusalem had involved them, or through
unjust treatment on the part of tax collectors and corrupt judges.
More amazing still was the knowledge that, all through the Shefelah,
the majority of vineyards and olive groves were not owned by those who
cultivated them, at all, but that they formed the vast estates of the
princes and wealthy men of Jerusalem.
The beautiful and fertile Shefelah, then, was not the habitation of
happy and contented tillers of the soil, who sang at their tasks and
prided themselves upon their independence! It was in the heavy grip of
a _land trust_, controlled by the great interests in the capital!
This knowledge caused Micah to enter upon his investigations with
greater interest and deeper feeling. He discovered that the nobility
and the rich were fattening upon the sweat and toil of the rural and
working population. A farmer thrown into debt was sure to lose his
acres, and a wage earner, having no possessions that could be taken
from him, was sure to lose his liberty. Widows and orphans were
quickly robbed of their inheritances by the greedy land-grabbers of
the metropolis, aided by a corrupt judiciary.
All this was a severe shock to the young peasant. He, himself, born
and raised on a farm, had inherited his father's estates free from
debt. He lived simply, worked hard, saved a neat sum every year--and
imagined that every one else was doing the same.
Awakened to the real condition of affairs, Micah now determined to
leave his estates in the care of his trusted overseers and to go to
the great and famed cities of his land, to study at first hand the
causes that had made possible the terrible economic and social wrongs
in his section of the country.
CHAPTER II.
_The Cause of the Common People._
Micah, the Moreshtite, came to Jerusalem when the capital was at
comparative peace. The struggle between King Ahaz and the Prophet
Isaiah had narrowed down to an armed neutrality, as it were--the king
was paying his tributes to Tiglath-Pileser and the prophet was
preparing his "Remnant" for the day when the crown prince, Hezekiah,
would come to the throne.
The young peasant took no sides and embraced no causes in Jerusalem.
He stood aside, the better to study conditions as an onlooker. To his
great dismay and sorrow, he found the situation even worse than he had
imagined it. It was true of the rich and mighty of the capital that
"They covet fields and seize them,
And houses, and take them away.
They oppress a man and his house,
Even a man and his heritage."
This much was clear on the surface of things.
Rapacity on the part of the rich meant oppression
of the poor; increase of power for the mighty meant
decrease of opportunity for the humble tiller of the
soil and for the wage earner.
Seeing all this and understanding it, Micah felt himself impelled to
fight the cause of the common people.
Conditions and a sympathetic soul thus made Micah a Prophet.
One of the people, he spoke in their behalf with the feeling and
passion of a man who has been through the mill of bitter experience:
Woe is me! for I am as when they have gathered the summer fruits,
As when they glean the grapes of the vintage:
There is no cluster to eat,
Nor first-ripe fig which my soul desireth.
The godly man has perished out of the earth,
And the upright among men is no more:
They all lie in wait for blood;
They hunt every man his brother with a net.
Both hands are put forth for evil,
To do it diligently.
The prince asketh and the judge is ready for reward,
And the great man, he uttereth the evil of his soul;
Thus they weave it together.
The best of them is as a brier;
The most upright is worse than a thorn hedge.
A man's enemies are the men of his own house.
Where shall he look for help and guidance--he, a commoner, without
power, without influence? To whom shall he go for instruction, for
inspiration, to struggle against conditions in the face of which he
was helpless?
Micah returned to Moresheth to think matters over at his leisure. It
was not an easy or simple task that he had voluntarily assumed.
One source of strength he always had to rely upon. Close to the soil,
seeing the Creator's handiwork in the fields at his feet by day and in
the wonders of the starry firmament by night, he was full of the
spirit of God.
At the very outset of his self-imposed mission he could exclaim,
fervently:
"But as for me, I will look unto the Lord:
I will wait for the God of my salvation:
My God will hear me."
God's guiding hand often leads us to our destinations by winding and
unexpected paths. It is strange to record that Micah's first
opportunity, in the task he had set before himself, came to him by way
of Egypt and an Ethiopian usurper. The ambitions of that wily Pharaoh
led directly to the fall of Samaria and to the Commoner's first great
prophetic utterance.
CHAPTER III.
_When Samaria Fell._
A man who is a traitor to his country will, in all likelihood, prove
traitorous to his avowed friends.
Hoshea, son of Elah, of Samaria, was such a man. Tilgath-Pileser, the
Assyrian conqueror of Damascus assisted Hoshea to assassinate King
Pekah, and appointed the assassin to rule in Pekah's stead, in the
year 734 B. C. E., merely as a matter of expediency. It was an easier
method of re-annexing the rebellious Kingdom of Israel to the Assyrian
Empire without cost of life or treasure, and he stooped to it.
But when Tiglath-Pileser died and Shalmaneser IV succeeded him on the
throne in Nineveh, Hoshea gave ear to the siren voice of Egypt, and
rebelled.
It is related that Hoshea sent an embassy to King So, more correctly,
Pharaoh Sabako, of Egypt, when that energetic Ethiopian prince became
master over the whole of the ancient Nile country.
The new Pharaoh had ambitions northward. It was he who organized a
coalition of Assyrian provinces in the Mediterranean country, with an
eye to Nineveh. The traitor, Hoshea, proved the miserable stuff he was
made of by joining actively in Sabako's ambitious schemes.
In answer to Sabako, Shalmaneser rushed his veteran troops toward
Egypt. The Kingdom of Israel was the first rebellious province he had
to deal with. Hoshea was prepared when, in 728, Samaria was besieged.
Samaria held out bravely enough for two years, waiting all the time
for help from Egypt. But Sabako's promised armies and funds never
came.
Shalmaneser died during this siege; but his successor, the great
Sargon, came on with re-enforcements and finally, in 721, captured and
reduced Samaria, before Hoshea's Egyptian ally had been heard from.
That was the end of the Kingdom of Israel, founded by Jeroboam ben
Nebat, in the year 937, B. C. E., when he rebelled from Rehoboam, King
Solomon's son. The Kingdom of Israel had lasted just 218 years.
Sargon sent away 27,290 captives, the youth and pride of Israel and
Samaria, and had them scattered widely apart, in all his provinces.
The conqueror, himself, proceeded southward to meet and defeat Sabako,
at Raphia, on the great Nile-delta-highway along the Mediterranean
coast.
While the records do not show that these events made any impression
upon the leaders of thought, such as Isaiah, in Jerusalem, they
brought Micah his first opportunity to prohesy.
Living in Moresheth, on the highroad from Gaza to Jerusalem, Micah,
who up to this time knew only of the corruption of the classes and the
oppression of the masses of Judah, now had first-hand information of
the political situation, as well.
Sargon's armies captured and passed through Gaza on their march to
Raphia. By way of Gaza, Micah learned that Samaria had not been razed
to the ground. There was, therefore, hope for the city and for Israel.
Micah's hope, however, was not political. He, unlike Isaiah in
Jerusalem, was not concerned with politics. His concern was with the
social wrongs and economic outrages of which, as he had now learned,
both Israel and Judah were victims.
There was this distinction, however, Israel had already collected the
wages of its sins, had paid the price and had been chastised by the
rod of Assyria. Judah might be recalled to its better self and escape
a similar calamity.
So, before the dust of Sargon's victorious armies, passing through
Gaza, had settled in the roads, Micah went again to Jerusalem and
launched forth earnestly and with vigor upon his prophetic mission.
In his very first public utterance he drew a deadly parallel between
Israel and Judah:
"Hear, ye peoples, all of you;
Hearken, O earth, and all that therein is:
And let the Lord God be witness against you,
The Lord from His holy temple.
For, behold, the Lord cometh forth out of His place.
And will come down, and tread upon the high places the earth.
And the mountains shall be molten under Him,
And the valleys shall be cleft,
As wax before the fire,
As waters that are poured down a steep place.
For the transgression of Jacob is all this,
And for the sins of the house of Israel.
What is the transgression of Jacob? Is it not Samaria?
And what are the high places of Judah?
Are they not Jerusalem?"
Fearlessly, with bold strokes, and in vivid pictures, he described the
terrible conditions as he knew them:
"Hear, I pray you, ye chiefs of Jacob,
And ye judges of the house of Israel!
You surely ought to know what is just!
Yet, you hate good and love evil;
You who devour the flesh of my people,
Flay their skin from off of them,
And break their bones!"
It was possible for Judah to be saved, if the governing classes, the
judiciary, the great landowners and the wealthy merchants dealt justly
and righteously with the common people, the poor, the peasant and the
wage earner:
"For this will I lament and wail;
I will go stripped and naked;
I will make a wailing like the jackals,
And a lamentation like the ostriches."
Micah did more than merely preach and wail. Down in the Shefelah he
set himself to help his fellow-peasants and to correct the injustices
practiced upon them, wherever he could.
But the western foothills were not the whole of Judah; and the origin
and source of the demoralizing wickedness lay not in the farm
sections, but in the capital; and as to the capital, "her wounds are
incurable." The cause of the downfall of Samaria and Israel
"Is come even to Judah;
It reacheth unto the gate of my people,
Even unto Jerusalem."
Therefore Micah, less hopeful than Isaiah, who was biding his time for
a change of heart in the rulers and chiefs of the country, said of the
coming of the day of reckoning:
"Then shall they cry unto the Lord, but He will not answer them:
Yea, He will hide His face from them at that time,
According as they have wrought evil in their doings."
CHAPTER IV.
_Judah Learns its Lesson._
King Hezekiah's preparation for rebellion against Sennacherib, in 715,
shattered any optimistic hopes that Micah held for a continuation of
improvement in the condition of the common people, in which he had
been instrumental up to this time. The costs of war always fell
heaviest on the poor, and the devastating results of war upon the
farming population.
Younger and readier to act than his older contemporary, Isaiah, he was
not satisfied with a negative warning, such as the older prophet gave
the leaders in Jerusalem when he walked about the city barefoot and in
the garb of a slave.
Micah came up to the capital to stir it up; and he did set the people
to talking and to thinking when, in a memorable speech, he differed
fundamentally from Isaiah in his declaration that the Temple, the very
House of God, as well as the city in which it was situated, could and
would be destroyed:
"Hear this, I pray you, ye heads of the house of Jacob,
And rulers of the house of Israel,
That abhor justice and pervert all equity;
That build up Zion with blood,
And Jerusalem with iniquity.
The heads thereof judge for reward,
And the priests thereof teach for hire,
And the prophets thereof divine for money;
Yet will they lean upon the Lord, and say,
'Is not the Lord in the midst of us?
No evil shall come to us.'
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 a forest."
Micah, naturally, received opposition from the same clique of false
prophets that opposed Isaiah, and made his labors so difficult and, at
first, unsuccessful; that misled king and people, "that bite with
their teeth and cry, 'Peace,' to make my people to err." To these
Micah gave as well as he received:
"The seers shall be put to shame,
And the diviners confounded.
Yea, they shall all cover their lips,
For there is no answer of God.
But as for me,
I am full of power by the spirit of the Lord,
And of judgment and of might,
To declare unto Jacob his transgression
And unto Israel his sin."
For years Micah kept at his task. He was indeed a tribune of the people,
the champion of their rights against the vested interests, the great
commoner of his day and time, fearlessly and courageously standing out
against all opposition, trusting absolutely in God.
At last came the crisis of 704-1 and Hezekiah's memorable change of
mind and heart. Micah played no mean part with Isaiah, in Hezekiah's
reforms that followed.
Reforms were needed, however, not alone by "the heads of the house of
Jacob" and "the rulers of the house of Israel," not alone in the
courts of law and among the priests and prophets; they were needed as
well in the religious beliefs and practices of the common people,
whose cause was Micah's cause.
With the passing of all political danger to the fatherland, Micah
retired permanently to his farms in Moresheth. There he devoted the
remainder of his peaceful, happy years to teaching the common people,
"_my_ people," as he fondly refers to them, the religious, moral
and ethical life that God demanded of them.
Micah employed the same vivid, picturesque language in his speeches of
peace as he did in his addresses of war. There is extant a remarkable
oration in which he pictures a religious controversy between God and
his people, and in which he makes a declaration of what _true
religion_ is that has not been better phrased in all the thousands
of books that have been written on religious subjects since that day.
The address is in the form of a dialogue between God and Israel, and
reads as follows:
"Hear ye now what the Lord is saying:
'Arise, contend thou before the mountains,
And let the hills hear thy voice.
Hear, O ye mountains, the Lord's controversty,
And ye enduring rocks, the foundations of the earth:
For the Lord hath a controversy with His people,
And He will plead with Israel."
Then God is pictured pleading with the people:
"O my people, what harm have I done unto thee?
And wherein have I wearied thee?
Testify against me.
Is it because I brought thee out of the land of Egypt,
And redeemed thee out of the house of bondage,
And sent before thee Moses, Aaron and Miriam?
O my people, remember now what Balak, king of Moab, devised,
And what Balaam, the son of Beor, answered him;
(Remember what took place) from Shittim unto Gilgal,
That ye may know the righteous acts of the Lord."
As with the purely religious teachings of the older prophets, the people
could not quite understand Micah. They believed that religion consisted
in offering the prescribed sacrifices regularly, and that, in having
fulfilled this obligation they had performed their religious duties.
The average Judean's idea of religion, of the relationship between man
and God, was that of a _bargain_ between man and God; so many
sacrifices brought to God, so many favors from God, in return; the
more precious and numerous the sacrificial oils and burnt offerings,
even to one's children, offered to God, the more precious and numerous
would be the blessings from God.
To this false idea Micah replies, with irony that stings, in these
words:
"Wherewith shall I come before the Lord,
And bow myself before God on high?
Shall I come before Him with burnt offerings,
With calves of a year old?
Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,
Or with ten thousands of rivers of oil?
Shall I give my first-born for my transgression,
The fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?"
To which God answers, through Micah, in the world-famed and unparalleled
definition of religion:
"It hath been declared unto thee, O man, what is good:
Yea, what doth the Lord require of thee,
But to do justice, and to love mercy,
And to walk humbly with thy God?"
THE PROPHET OF WOE AND HOPE
CHAPTER I.
_The Escape._
The entirely unexpected assassination of King Amon, of Judah, in the
year 639, surprised and appalled the entire country, as well as
Jerusalem, the capital.
King Amon had succeeded his father, Manasseh, to the throne of Judah
but two years before. He had had no chance to show the character of
man he was and the type of a ruler he would be, and yet, without
apparent knowledge on anybody's part that a conspiracy was brewing
among the princes of the royal palace itself, Amon's life was snatched
away in a most cruel manner.
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