Chizuk Emunah Under the Microscope: Chapter 33

Micah 5:2, "But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall come forth unto me a ruler in Israel, whose goings forth have been from everlasting."

Micah was a prophet who lived during the times of Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah. This made him a contemporary of Hosea and Isaiah. Micah brings forth God's charges against his people, indicating that Assyria and Babylon were instruments of divine wrath against both the Northern Kingdom of Israel and the Kingdom of Judah.

In the 5th chapter, Micah mentions the town of Bethlehem, a town of the tribe of Judah, and one which brought forth kings. Both the targums and Pirkei d. R. Eliezar consider this passage to be a messianic prophecy. Bethlehem was the town of King David, and therefore the town of his descendants.

This verse has been designated by the Christians as confirming their faith; and they assert that the prophet meant to say that their Messiah would be born at Bethlehem, and they declare that it is impossible for Israel to expect that the Messiah will be born there, seeing that the city of Bethlehem has already been destroyed.

Bethlehem is an oddly specific detail. There is a scene in Breaking Bad where the drug dealer Jesse Pinkman suspects that a boy has been poisoned with ricin. He tells the boy's mother to make sure that the doctors test for it, and as a result is arrested and taken in for questioning. The detectives ask Jesse that of all the poisons that one could use, how could Jesse have any knowledge that it would be ricin? Jesse's knowledge of this oddly specific detail is seen as reason to believe that he was involved in the poisoning. Similarly, of all the places that Messiah could be born, how could Micah know that it would be the small town of Bethlehem?

Refutation.—For three reasons it is impossible to vindicate this prophecy in favour of Jesus, setting aside the numerous other unsubstantial arguments they allege to prove that he was the true Messiah. First,—The above scriptural passage has no special allusion to him. The birth of Jesus in Bethlehem does not entitle him to the claim of being the Messiah, for hundreds and thousands of children were born at Bethlehem, and that casualty did not constitute them Messiahs.

The first point is a pretty weak argument. Bethlehem was a small town, not a large city like Jerusalem or Ramoth-Gilead. In fact, Micah said either that it was the smallest of the town of Judah or that it was too small to be counted among those towns, depending on which reading you use. In either case, the point is made. Only a very small percentage of the population was born there, which is why the birth of Jesus in that town is oddly specific.

Secondly,—We read there, "From thee shall come forth unto me a ruler." Now, as to Jesus of Nazareth, he was by no means a ruler. On the contrary, the people ruled over him, as is evinced by the mode of his death. 

On the contrary. Not only did Jesus admit to being king of the Jews, but he also rules the Gentile world as well. I answer that entire nations have submitted to his words and his commands, and Time Magazine (not a Christian-friendly publication) considered Jesus to the most influential person who ever lived. Furthermore, he has been raised from the dead, and will rule Israel as king in the era when the temple is rebuilt and Israel claims sovereignty over all nations. How did you think that Israel would rule the world? Because much of the world is already in submission to Jesus, so that when he returns to rule Israel directly, the world will submit to Israel because it has already submitted to Jesus.

As an aside, Maimonides wrote that Christianity exists in order to bring Gentile nations in submission to Israel, so that when the real Messiah, and not Jesus, arrives, the world will submit to him. The problem with Maimonides' position is that the New Testament warns about such an individual who will rebuild the temple and make peace with Israel's neighbors. Such a person is antichrist, and committed Christians would fight to the death to oppose such an individual. We are to oppose him to our dying breath. If Rabbinic Judaism is true, then Christianity is a stumbling block to the Gentile nations, not a guide for them. If Jesus is Messiah, then Christianity is in fact a mechanism to bring the Gentiles in submission to Israel.

Thirdly,—It is not said that Bethlehem would be the birth-place of the Messiah, for we find that the prophet adds there, "And his going forth shall be of olden times." But the sense of the verse is this: Thou Bethlehem, although one of the minor localities among the cities of Judah, from thee a man shall come forth (i. e., trace his descent back to thee), who shall be a ruler in Israel, and that same man will be the King Messiah who will be a descendant of David who came from Bethlehem. See 1 Samuel 17:12, where he is termed "The son of an Ephrathite from Bethlehem Judah." The words "since olden times," relate to the great space of time elapsed between the reign of David and the coming of the Messiah. We must also call the attention of the reader to the chapter preceding and the passages following the verse on which we are treating, and it will then be perceived that the whole prophecy is applied to the terrific convulsions predicted to happen at the epoch of the "latter days." In connection with this prophecy must be read the announcements of Ezekiel 38 and 39, and Zechariah 14: We must not be deterred from the adoption of this interpretation by the frequent recurrence in Amos 4 of the particle which, by its signification "And now," may be considered to indicate, that the subject of the prophecy is close at hand, for we frequently find the same עתה (now) is used merely to make an event present to the imagination, which event may, nevertheless, be exceedingly remote from its actual fulfillment.

Micah said that the origins of this person will be from old, from ancient days. The verse uses both kedem and olam. Repetition in Semitic literature is used for emphasis. If Micah meant that "old, ancient days" only meant David, then his view is that ancient antiquity only means about 300 years ago.

A. Lukyn Willams also writes of this passage: "Another interpretation is that the thought of a Messiah existed in the Divine mind for long ages before the appearance of Messiah. No doubt it so existed. But that does not satisfy the language here. "Goings forth" cannot mean intentions, or plans, or purposes, of going forth. It is an abuse of language to interpret the term thus. It really does look then as though the term were intended to mean that Messiah Himself existed for ages before He appeared."

See, for instance, Isaiah 43:19, "Behold I am doing a new thing, now it shall spring forth." This prophecy treated of an event to be fulfilled long after the time in which the prophet lived, ibid. 49:19: "For now thou [O land] art straightened, and without inhabitants, but those who swallow thee up are yet far away." See also Ezekiel 39:25, "Now I shall bring back the captivity of Jacob, and have mercy upon all the house of Israel." And ibid, 43:9, "Now they shall remove from me their lewdness and the carcasses of their kings." 

Notice Troki's reasoning here. He says that the Hebrew word for "now" does not always mean simultaneous with the utterance of the speaker. A speaker could introduce himself with a story. "A funny thing happened to me last week. I was walking to the grocery store and got lost, so now I'm wandering around trying to find a street name that I recognize. . ." In the story, the term "now" is a relative use of the term. It means "now" relative to the story, not relative to the speaker. This can make sense of Isaiah 9.

For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end, on the throne of David and over his kingdom, to establish it and to uphold it with justice and with righteousness from now and forevermore. The zeal of the LORD of hosts will do this. (Isaiah 9:6-7) 

The "now" does not mean the time of Isaiah, but when child comes.

The whole tendency of the prophecies we have now treated on, shows evidently that unfulfilled events are spoken of relating to the time of our Messiah when we shall be gathered together to the Holy Land, and when, after the overthrow of the opposing powers, universal peace shall reign on earth. No man can argue that those promises were fulfilled by Jesus of Nazareth, or his disciples. For the founders of the Christian religion passed their lives in unmitigated trouble, nor can it be asserted that an allusion to the Eternal God is implied by, "And his coming forth is from ancient time from the days of old." We cannot possibly attribute to the Infinite Being a "coming forth"; moreover, we shall have occasion to show, from our refutation of the Gospels, the total impropriety of giving Jesus the title of God, and from what we have advanced hitherto, it is quite evident that Jesus was just as far from being a Messiah, as he was from being a Divinity. 

 And this is Troki's real problem with Jesus as Messiah. He has already decided, prior to reading the prophecies, that God cannot enter into this world and have "coming forth" from any time, nor can he apparently enter into history in corporeal form. The world "olam" is often used to indicate eternity, so it makes sense to interpret the coming forth being from the days of eternity.

Troki spends a great deal of this chapter giving his own interpretation of the passage, which I am not going to deal with. I will give the reply from A. Lukyn Williams regarding it.

242] (5). We need not discuss at length the rest of the Rabbi's arguments. For he is not content with discussing this verse on its own merits. He endeavours to show that the context forbids its application to the Lord Jesus, for the prophet in 4:11-5:1 (Heb. 4:11-14) speaks of the coming of Gog and Magog after the return of the Jews to their own land. We have however already examined in paragraph 45 the relation which these events hold to the coming of Messiah, and must refer our readers to that paragraph. The verses that follow are more important, and R. Isaac devotes much space to an examination of them. They are very difficult, but briefly they tell us that God will give up His people "until the time that she which travaileth hath brought forth," and then Messiah shall bring peace, and drive out the foes. Of course the Rabbi interprets the woman as the nation, and the travail-pains as sufferings to be borne before the coming of the Messiah. Even if this be right we may not forget that before the time of the Lord Jesus the nation had had great suffering, in the destruction of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar and the subsequent Captivity, the oppression by Artaxerxes Ochus in the fourth century B.C., the persecution and desecration wrought by Antiochus Epiphanes, and the conquest of Jerusalem by Pompey, with the other humiliations inflicted by the Romans.

243] Yet the juxtaposition of the travailing woman with the birth of the ideal ruler who has existed "from of old, from everlasting" suggests that the prophecy is rather to be connected with that of the Virgin in Isaiah 7 (see parr 186-191), and that Micah, like his greater contemporary, adopts as his own the hope (whencesoever derived is of no importance) that the Deliverer will be born of a virgin-mother.

In either case it is plain that on Messiah's coming there are to be full blessings for Messiah's people and land.

244] We cannot however imagine that Divine compulsion would be used in order to accomplish this. If then any Jew of to-day were to suppose the possibility of the appearance of the Messiah in the first century of the present era, and to ask himself how He would be treated if, when He appeared, He confined Himself to the noblest and highest of all forms of government, that of moral influence, and his answer were (as we feel sure would be the case) that He would receive treatment similar to that which Jesus did in fact receive, what objection could be made? For God's promises are not absolute but conditional, and based upon moral events, and if the Jews did reject Messiah they had no right to expect the same results to follow as if they had accepted Him. The blessings announced by Micah were necessarily contingent upon the reception of Him through whom the blessings were to come.