The Expositor's Bible: The Book of the Twelve Prophets, Vol. 1: Commonly Called the MinorSmith, George Adam
Religion
The Expositor's Bible: The Book of the Twelve Prophets, Vol. 1: Commonly Called the Minor
Smith, George Adam
Bible. Minor Prophets -- Commentaries
[837] Josh. xv. 44; mentioned with Keilah and Mareshah; perhaps the
present Ain Kezbeh, 8 miles N.N.E. of Beit-Jibrin.
[838] מָרֵשָׁה, but in Josh. xv. 44 מראשה, which is identical with
spelling of the present name of a ruin 1 mile S. of Beit-Jibrin.
Μαρησα is placed by Eusebius (_Onom._) 2 Roman miles S. of
Eleutheropolis ( = Beit-Jibrin).
[839] 6 miles N.E. of Beit-Jibrin.
CHAPTER XXVI
_THE PROPHET OF THE POOR_
MICAH ii., iii.
We have proved Micah's love for his countryside in the effusion of
his heart upon her villages with a grief for their danger greater
than his grief for Jerusalem. Now in his treatment of the sins
which give that danger its fatal significance, he is inspired by
the same partiality for the fields and the folk about him. While
Isaiah chiefly satirises the fashions of the town and the intrigues
of the court, Micah scourges the avarice of the landowner and the
injustice which oppresses the peasant. He could not, of course, help
sharing Isaiah's indignation for the fatal politics of the capital,
any more than Isaiah could help sharing his sense of the economic
dangers of the provinces;[840] but it is the latter with which Micah
is most familiar and on which he spends his wrath. These so engross
him, indeed, that he says almost nothing about the idolatry, or the
luxury, or the hideous vice, which, according to Amos and Hosea, were
now corrupting the nation.
Social wrongs are always felt most acutely, not in the town, but in
the country. It was so in the days of Rome, whose earliest social
revolts were agrarian.[841] It was so in the Middle Ages: the
fourteenth century saw both the Jacquerie in France and the Peasants'
Rising in England; Langland, who was equally familiar with town and
country, expends nearly all his sympathy upon the poverty of the
latter, "the poure folk in cotes." It was so after the Reformation,
under the new spirit of which the first social revolt was the
Peasants' War in Germany. It was so at the French Revolution, which
began with the march of the starving peasants into Paris. And it is
so still, for our new era of social legislation has been forced open,
not by the poor of London and the large cities, but by the peasantry
of Ireland and the crofters of the Scottish Highlands. Political
discontent and religious heresy take their start among industrial and
manufacturing centres, but the first springs of the social revolt are
nearly always found among rural populations.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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