Mikha 4:2

4:2 Many nations will come, saying,

“Come on! Let’s go up to the Lord’s mountain,

to the temple ¹  of Jacob’s God,

so he can teach us his commands ² 

and we can live by his laws.” ³ 

For Zion will be the source of instruction;

the Lord’s teachings will proceed from Jerusalem. ⁴ 

Mikha 4:13

4:13 “Get up and thresh, Daughter Zion!

For I will give you iron horns; ⁵ 

I will give you bronze hooves,

and you will crush many nations.” ⁶ 

You will devote to the Lord the spoils you take from them,

and dedicate their wealth to the sovereign Ruler ⁷  of the whole earth. ⁸ 

Mikha 7:17

7:17 They will lick the dust like a snake,

like serpents crawling on the ground. ⁹ 

They will come trembling from their strongholds

to the Lord our God; ¹⁰ 

they will be terrified ¹¹  of you. ¹² 

[4:2]  ¹ tn Heb “house.”

[4:2]  ² tn Heb “ways.”

[4:2]  ³ tn Heb “and we can walk in his paths.”

[4:2]  ⁴ tn Heb “instruction [or, “law”] will go out from Zion, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.”

[4:2]  map For location see Map5 B1; Map6 F3; Map7 E2; Map8 F2; Map10 B3; JP1 F4; JP2 F4; JP3 F4; JP4 F4.

[4:13]  ⁵ tn Heb “I will make your horn iron.”

[4:13]  ⁶ sn Jerusalem (Daughter Zion at the beginning of the verse; cf. 4:8) is here compared to a powerful ox which crushes the grain on the threshing floor with its hooves.

[4:13]  ⁷ tn Or “the Lord” (so many English versions); Heb “the master.”

[4:13]  ⁸ tn Heb “and their wealth to the master of all the earth.” The verb “devote” does double duty in the parallelism and is supplied in the second line for clarification.

[4:13]  sn In vv. 11-13 the prophet jumps from the present crisis (which will result in exile, v. 10) to a time beyond the restoration of the exiles when God will protect his city from invaders. The Lord’s victory over the Assyrian armies in 701 b.c. foreshadowed this.

[7:17]  ⁹ tn Heb “like crawling things on the ground.” The parallelism suggests snakes are in view.

[7:17]  ¹⁰ tn Thetranslationassumesthatthe phrase אֶל־יְהוָה אֱלֹהֵינוּ (’el-yÿhvah ’elohenu, “to the Lord our God”) goes with what precedes. Another option is to take the phrase with the following verb, in which case one could translate, “to the Lord our God they will turn in dread.”

[7:17]  ¹¹ tn Heb “they will be in dread and afraid.”

[7:17]  ¹² tn The Lord is addressed directly using the second person.