Mikha 1:16

1:16 Shave your heads bald as you mourn for the children you love; ¹ 

shave your foreheads as bald ²  as an eagle, ³ 

for they are taken from you into exile.

Mikha 2:12

The Lord Will Restore His People

2:12 I will certainly gather all of you, O Jacob,

I will certainly assemble those Israelites who remain. ⁴ 

I will bring them together like sheep in a fold, ⁵ 

like a flock in the middle of a pasture; ⁶ 

they will be so numerous that they will make a lot of noise. ⁷ 

Mikha 4:12

4:12 But they do not know what the Lord is planning;

they do not understand his strategy.

He has gathered them like stalks of grain to be threshed ⁸  at the threshing floor.

Mikha 7:10

7:10 When my enemies see this, they will be covered with shame.

They say ⁹  to me, “Where is the Lord your God?”

I will gloat over them. ¹⁰ 

Then they will be trampled down ¹¹ 

like mud in the streets.

Mikha 7:17

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

like serpents crawling on the ground. ¹² 

They will come trembling from their strongholds

to the Lord our God; ¹³ 

they will be terrified ¹⁴  of you. ¹⁵ 

[1:16]  ¹ tn Heb “over the sons of your delight.”

[1:16]  ² tn Heb “make wide your baldness.”

[1:16]  ³ tn Or “a vulture” (cf. NIV, TEV); CEV “a buzzard.” The Hebrew term נֶשֶׁר (nesher) refers to the griffon vulture or eagle.

[2:12]  ⁴ tn Heb “the remnant of Israel.”

[2:12]  ⁵ tc The MT reads בָּצְרָה (batsrah, “Bozrah”) but the form should be emended to בַּצִּרָה (batsirah, “into the fold”). See D. R. Hillers, Micah (Hermeneia), 38.

[2:12]  ⁶ tc The MT reads “its pasture,” but the final vav (ו) belongs with the following verb. See GKC 413 §127.i.

[2:12]  ⁷ tn Heb “and they will be noisy [or perhaps, “excited”] from men.” The subject of the third feminine plural verb תְּהִימֶנָה (tÿhimenah, “they will be noisy”) is probably the feminine singular צֹאן (tso’n, “flock”). (For another example of this collective singular noun with a feminine plural verb, see Gen 30:38.) In the construction מֵאָדָם (me’adam, “from men”) the preposition is probably causal. L. C. Allen translates “bleating in fear of men” (Joel, Obadiah, Jonah, and Micah [NICOT], 300), but it is possible to take the causal sense as “because of the large quantity of men.” In this case the sheep metaphor and the underlying reality are mixed.

[4:12]  ⁸ tn The words “to be threshed” are not in the Hebrew text, but have been supplied in the translation to make it clear that the Lord is planning to enable “Daughter Zion” to “thresh” her enemies.

[7:10]  ⁹ tn Heb “who say.” A new sentence was begun here in the translation for stylistic reasons.

[7:10]  ¹⁰ tn Heb “My eyes will look on them.”

[7:10]  ¹¹ tn Heb “a trampled-down place.”

[7:17]  ¹² tn Heb “like crawling things on the ground.” The parallelism suggests snakes are in view.

[7:17]  ¹³ 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]  ¹⁴ tn Heb “they will be in dread and afraid.”

[7:17]  ¹⁵ tn The Lord is addressed directly using the second person.