_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 is the sin of the house_[818] _of Judah? is it not Jerusalem?_ _Therefore do I turn Samaria into a ruin of the field,_[819] _And into vineyard terraces;_ _And I pour down her stones to the glen,_ _And lay bare her foundations._[820] _All her images are shattered,_ _And all her hires are being burned in the fire;_ _And all her idols I lay desolate,_ _For from the hire of a harlot they were gathered,_[821] _And to a harlot's hire they return._[822] The prophet speaks:-- _For this let me mourn, let me wail,_ _Let me go barefoot and stripped_ (of my robe), _Let me make lamentation like the jackals,_ _And mourning like the daughters of the desert._[823] _For her stroke_[824] _is desperate;_ _Yea, it hath come unto Judah!_ _It hath smitten right up to the gate of my people,_ _Up to Jerusalem._ Within the capital itself Isaiah was also recording the extension of the Assyrian invasion to its walls, but in a different temper.[825] He was full of the exulting assurance that, although at the very gate, the Assyrian could not harm the city of Jehovah, but must fall when he lifted his impious hand against it. Micah has no such hope: he is overwhelmed with the thought of Jerusalem's danger. Provincial though he be, and full of wrath at the danger into which the politicians of Jerusalem had dragged the whole country, he profoundly mourns the peril of the capital, _the gate of my people_, as he fondly calls her. Therefore we must not exaggerate the frequently drawn contrast between Isaiah and himself.[826] To Micah also Jerusalem was dear, and his subsequent prediction of her overthrow[827] ought to be read with the accent of this previous mourning for her peril. Nevertheless his heart clings most to his own home, and while Isaiah pictures the Assyrian entering Judah from the north by Migron, Michmash and Nob, Micah anticipates invasion by the opposite gateway of the land, at the door of his own village. His elegy sweeps across the landscape so dear to him. This obscure province was even more than Jerusalem his world, the world of his heart. It gives us a living interest in the man that the fate of these small villages, many of them vanished, should excite in him more passion than the fortunes of Zion herself. In such a passion we can incarnate his spirit. Micah is no longer a book, or an oration, but flesh and blood upon a home and a countryside of his own. We see him on his housetop pouring forth his words before the hills and the far-stretching heathen land. In the name of every village within sight he reads a symbol of the curse that is coming upon his country, and