The story of Abraham and Isaac also proves that human sacrifices to Jehovah were not unknown among the Hebrews.  In this story Jehovah finally intervenes and allows Abraham to offer up a ram instead of his own son.  Yet the story implies the belief that Jehovah might demand of a father that he kill his own son and burn him on the altar.  These ideas continued to be believed even down to the time of the prophets, Amos and Hosea, and the others about whom we will study.

THE PROPHET MICAH AND HIS MESSAGE

About the time that Hosea was finishing his sad career in the north another prophet in the south caught up the torch of light and truth.  His name was Micah.  Like the two great men who preceded him, Amos and Hosea, his heart was stirred to pity and indignation by the sufferings of the poor and by the injustice and luxury of the rich and powerful.  In plain, direct, and fiery sentences he denounced these evils and foretold punishment.  Because of these things, he declared that “Jerusalem shall become heaps, and the mountain of the house as the high places of a forest.”

Micah was especially bitter against those men who made religion their business, and used it as a means of oppressing the poor—­the prophets who proclaim a holy war against those “who put not into their mouths,” that is, those who do not give them presents.  The priests, Micah says, “teach for hire, and the prophets thereof divine for money.”

=Micah’s great message.=—­It was, of course, the existence of superstitious fears in the hearts of the people which made it possible for the priests and the prophets to join with the rich nobles in preying upon them.  “You give me this or that,” “You pay for this sacrifice or that—­or I will call down a curse upon you from Jehovah.  Some dreadful misfortune will come upon you.”  With one great word whose throbbing pity for the ignorance and sorrow of men makes it another of the great utterances of human lips, Micah cut the root of all such fears.  Jehovah is not that kind of a God, he declared.  He does not break out in fits of rage.  He does not need to be wheedled back into good nature by costly offerings, perhaps even sometimes with the costliest offerings of all, one’s own darling children.

="Wherewith shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before the high God?  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?  He hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God."=

STUDY TOPICS

1.  Read the stories of the ark, referred to in this chapter.  See 1 Samuel 6. 1-20; 2 Samuel 6. 1-9.  What other way of explaining the death of Uzzah and of the men of Beth-shemesh occurs to you rather than the anger of Jehovah?  In the case of the men of Beth-shemesh, read 1 Samuel 5, with its clear indications of contagious disease.