Canter Bridge

Truth be told, the Hebrew Bible’s Book of Micah throws in front of its reader some very grim reading.

Yet it ends with an inspiring flourish:

Who is a God like you, pardoning iniquity and passing over transgression for the remnant of his inheritance? He does not retain his anger forever, because he delights in steadfast love. He will again have compassion on us; he will tread our iniquities underfoot. You will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea. You will show faithfulness to Jacob and steadfast love to Abraham, as you have sworn to our fathers from the days of old. (Micah 7:18–20 ESV)

A strong instinct in the biblical literature interprets Israel’s misfortune as the result of intergenerational rebellion. This is particularly true of that most intense crystallization of woe that we call the ‘Babylonian exile’, when all that Israel had been and felt herself entitled to become in future was lost, by all lights lost forever.

A countervailing impulse among certain of the prophets sees YHWH ‘having compassion again‘, choosing his defiled and bereft people again, and words to that effect. In this approach, a thin thread of odd definition of the deity finds its place, one that insists that judgement is his ‘strange’ or left-handed work. By contrast, showing mercy is his natural way with his people and his world. It represents the movement of YHWH’s dominant hand, if one may put things in this way.

The verses that bring Micah to its conclusion add to this picture the notion of YHWH transferring the object of his adversarial activity from the people to the people’s sins. Using vocabulary that would fit nicely in a description of the experience of exile, YHWH’s return to compassion has him wreaking violence upon Israel’s sins and iniquities. Presumably, the nation finds its own liberation in the mix as its centuries-long thick-headedness is attacked and brought to heel.

It is a powerful reversed metaphor.

YHWH will tread our iniquities underfoot. Having shown himself capable of ruining his own rebellious people, he now cast(s) all our sins into the depths of the sea.

It would be easy for modern readers and particular for Christian ones to read this in exclusively personal terms, as though YHWH dealt principally with the iniquities and sins of all the individuals who make up his people, end of story.

That would not be inaccurate. But it would be insufficient.

Just as the sentence has fallen in Micah and in other prophetic narrative upon the nation, so here it is Israel/Judah the people that will discover to its manifest amazement that YHWH is now bent on destroying its rebelliousness rather than the nation itself. The reference is decidedly communitarian rather than individualistic.

YHWH has become, by implication, their defending and merciful friend, for they ought to have understood by this point that their own ingrained hellaciousness is their worst enemy. In YHWH, that internal foe has now met its match.

When we have understood the corporate nature of this drama, then we individuals—weary from our own long struggle with self-destructive contrariness—are now also free to move about the cabin and take our own comfort.

That sound you hear?

That’s YHWH raising hell. And smashing it to bits.