obvious in ver.
4: "Then they shall cry unto the Lord, and He will not answer; and may
He hide[3] His face from them at this time, as they have behaved
themselves ill towards Him in their doings." Now, as in vers. 1-3
divine judgments had not yet been spoken of, the terms "then," and "at
this time," can refer only to the threatenings of punishment in ii. 3
ff., which have a special reference to the ungodly nobles.

Thus the result presented at the beginning, is confirmed to us by
internal reasons. The inscription[4] announces the oracles [Pg 417] of
God which came to Micah under the reign of three kings; while the
examination of the contents proves that the collection forms a
connected whole, written _uno tenore_. How, now, can these two facts be
reconciled in any other way than by supposing that we have here before
us a comprehensive picture of the prophetic ministry of Micah, the
single component parts of which are at once contemporaneous, and yet
belonging to different periods? This supposition, moreover, affords
us the advantage of being allowed to maintain all the historical
references in their fullest import, without being led to disregard the
one, while we give attention to the other; for nothing is, in this
case, more natural, than that the prophet connects with one another
different prophecies uttered at different times.

The weight of these internal reasons is increased, however, by external
reasons which are equally strong. When Jeremiah was called to account
for his prophecy concerning the destruction of the city, the elders,
for his justification, appealed to the [Pg 418] entirely similar
prophecy of Micah in iii. 12: "Therefore shall Zion for your sake be
ploughed as a field, and Jerusalem shall become heaps of ruins, and the
mountain of the house as the high places of the forest." In Jer. xxvi.
18, 19, it is said, "Micah prophesied in the days of Hezekiah, king of
Judah, and spake to all the people of Judah, etc. Did Hezekiah, king of
Judah, and all Judah, put him to death? Did he not fear the Lord, and
besought the Lord, and the Lord repented Him of the evil which He had
pronounced against them?" All interpreters admit that this passage
forms an authority for the composition of the discourse in iii.-v.
under Hezekiah; but we cannot well limit it in this way, we must extend
it to the whole collection. For, even apart from the reasons by which
we proved that the entire book forms one closely connected wh