_THE SIN OF THE SCANT MEASURE_
MICAH vi. 9-vii. 6.
The state of the text of Micah vi. 9-vii. 6 is as confused as the
condition of society which it describes: it is difficult to get
reason, and impossible to get rhyme, out of the separate clauses. We
had best give it as it stands, and afterwards state the substance
of its doctrine, which, in spite of the obscurity of details, is,
as so often happens in similar cases, perfectly clear and forcible.
The passage consists of two portions, which may not originally have
belonged to each other, but which seem to reflect the same disorder
of civic life, with the judgment that impends upon it.[904] In the
first of them, vi. 9-16, the prophet calls for attention to the
voice of God, which describes the fraudulent life of Jerusalem, and
the evils He is bringing on her. In the second, vii. 1-6, Jerusalem
bemoans her corrupt society; but perhaps we hear her voice only in
ver. 1, and thereafter the prophet's.
The prophet speaks:--
_Hark! Jehovah crieth to the city!_
('_Tis salvation to fear Thy Name!_)[905]
_Hear ye, O tribe and council of the city!_ (?)[906]
God speaks:--
... in _the house of the wicked treasures of wickedness,_
_And the scant measure accursed!_
_Can she be pure with the evil balances,_
_And with the bag of false weights,_
_Whose rich men are full of violence,_[907]
_And her citizens speak falsehood,_
_And their tongue is deceit in their mouth?_
_But I on My part have begun to plague thee,_
_To lay_ thee _in ruin because of thy sins._
_Thou eatest and art not filled,_
_But thy famine_[908] _is in the very midst of thee!_
_And_ but _try to remove,_[909] _thou canst not bring off;_
_And what thou bringest off, I give to the sword._
_Thou sowest, but never reapest;_
_Treadest olives, but never anointest with oil,_
_And must, but not to drink wine!_
_So thou keepest the statutes of Omri,_[910]
_And the habits of the house of Ahab,_
_And walkest in their principles,_
Only _that I may give thee to ruin,_
_And her inhabitants for sport--_
_Yea, the reproach of the Gentiles_[911] _shall ye bear!_
Jerusalem speaks:--
_Woe, woe is me, for I am become like sweepings of harvest,_
_Like gleanings of the vintage--_
_Not a cluster to eat_, not _a fig that my soul lusteth after._
_Perished are the leal from the land,_
_Of the upright among men there is none:_
_All of them are lurking for blood;_
_Every man takes his brother in a net._
_Their hands are on evil to do it thoroughly._[912]
_The prince makes requisition,_
_The judge_ judgeth _for payment,_
_And the great man he speaketh his lust;_
_So_ together _they weave it out._
_The best of them is but a thorn thicket,_[913]
_The most upright_ worse _than a prickly hedge._[914]
_The day that thy sentinels_ saw, _thy visitation, draweth on;_
_Now is their havoc_[915] _come!_
_Trust not any friend! Rely on no confidant!_
_From her that lies in thy bosom guard the gates of thy mouth._
_For son insulteth father, daughter is risen against her mother,
daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law;_
_And the enemies of a man are the men of his house._
Micah, though the prophet of the country and stern critic of its
life, characterised Jerusalem herself as the centre of the nation's
sins. He did not refer to idolatry alone, but also to the irreligion
of the politicians, and the cruel injustice of the rich in the
capital. The poison which weakened the nation's blood had found
its entrance to their veins at the very heart. There had the evil
gathered which was shaking the state to a rapid dissolution.
This section of the Book of Micah, whether it be by that prophet
or not, describes no features of Jerusalem's life which were not
present in the eighth century; and it may be considered as the more
detailed picture of the evils he summarily denounced. It is one of
the most poignant criticisms of a commercial community which have
ever appeared in literature. In equal relief we see the meanest
instruments and the most prominent agents of covetousness and
cruelty--the scant measure, the false weights, the unscrupulous
prince and the venal judge. And although there are some sins
denounced which are impossible in our civilisation, yet falsehood,
squalid fraud, pitilessness of the everlasting struggle for life are
exposed exactly as we see them about us to-day. Through the prophet's
ancient and often obscure eloquence we feel just those shocks and
sharp edges which still break everywhere through our Christian
civilisation. Let us remember, too, that the community addressed by
the prophet was, like our own, professedly religious.
The most widespread sin with which the prophet charges Jerusalem in
these days of her commercial activity is falsehood: _Her inhabitants
speak lies, and their tongue is deceit in their mouth._ In Mr.
Lecky's _History of European Morals_ we find the opinion that "the
one respect in which the growth of industrial life has exercised a
favourable influence on morals has been in the promotion of truth." The
tribute is just, but there is another side to it. The exigencies of
commerce and industry are fatal to most of the conventional pretences,
insincerities and flatteries, which tend to grow up in all kinds of
society. In commercial life, more perhaps than in any other, a man
is taken, and has to be taken, in his inherent worth. Business, the
life which is called _par excellence_ Busy-ness, wears off every
mask, all false veneer and unction, and leaves no time for the cant
and parade which are so prone to increase in all other professions.
Moreover the soul of commerce is credit. Men have to show that they
can be trusted before other men will traffic with them, at least upon
that large and lavish scale on which alone the great undertakings of
commerce can be conducted. When we look back upon the history of trade
and industry, and see how they have created an atmosphere in which
men must ultimately seem what they really are; how they have of their
needs replaced the jealousies, subterfuges, intrigues, which were once
deemed indispensable to the relations of men of different peoples, by
large international credit and trust; how they break through the false
conventions that divide class from class, we must do homage to them, as
among the greatest instruments of the truth which maketh free.
But to all this there is another side. If commerce has exploded
so much conventional insincerity, it has developed a species of
the genus which is quite its own. In our days nothing can lie like
an advertisement. The saying "the tricks of the trade" has become
proverbial. Every one knows that the awful strain and harassing of
commercial life is largely due to the very amount of falseness that
exists. The haste to be rich, the pitiless rivalry and competition,
have developed a carelessness of the rights of others to the truth
from ourselves, with a capacity for subterfuge and intrigue, which
reminds one of nothing so much as that state of barbarian war out of
which it was the ancient glory of commerce to have assisted mankind
to rise. Are the prophet's words about Jerusalem too strong for large
portions of our own commercial communities? Men who know these best
will not say that they are. But let us cherish rather the powers
of commerce which make for truth. Let us tell men who engage in
trade that there are none for whom it is more easy to be clean and
straight; that lies, whether of action or of speech, only increase
the mental expense and the moral strain of life; and that the health,
the capacity, the foresight, the opportunities of a great merchant
depend ultimately on his resolve to be true and on the courage with
which he sticks to the truth.
One habit of falseness on which the prophet dwells is the use of
unjust scales and short measures. The _stores_ or fortunes of his
day are _stores of wickedness_, because they have been accumulated
by the use of the _lean ephah_, the _balances of wrong_ and _the
bag of false weights_. These are evils more common in the East than
with us: modern government makes them almost impossible. But, all
the same, ours is the sin of the scant measure, and the more so in
proportion to the greater speed and rivalry of our commercial life.
The prophet's name for it, _measure of leanness_, of _consumption_ or
_shrinkage_, is a proper symbol of all those duties and offices of
man to man, the full and generous discharge of which is diminished
by the haste and the grudge of a prevalent selfishness. The speed
of modern life tends to shorten the time expended on every piece of
work, and to turn it out untempered and incomplete. The struggle for
life in commerce, the organised rivalry between labour and capital,
not only puts every man on his guard against giving any other more
than his due, but tempts him to use every opportunity to scamp and
curtail his own service and output. You will hear men defend this
parsimony as if it were a law. They say that business is impossible
without the temper which they call "sharpness" or the habit which
they call "cutting it fine." But such character and conduct are the
very decay of society. The shrinkage of the units must always and
everywhere mean the disintegration of the mass. A society whose
members strive to keep within their duties is a society which cannot
continue to cohere. Selfishness may be firmness, but it is the
firmness of frost, the rigour of death. Only the unselfish excess
of duty, only the generous loyalty to others, give to society the
compactness and indissolubleness of life. Who is responsible for the
enmity of classes, and the distrust which exists between capital and
labour? It is the workman whose one aim is to secure the largest
amount of wages for the smallest amount of work, and who will, in
his blind pursuit of that, wreck the whole trade of a town or a
district; it is the employer who believes he has no duties to his men
beyond paying them for their work the least that he can induce them
to take; it is the customer who only and ever looks to the cheapness
of an article--procurer in that prostitution of talent to the work
of scamping which is fast killing art, and joy and all pity for the
bodies and souls of our brothers. These are the true anarchists and
breakers-up of society. On their methods social coherence and harmony
are impossible. Life itself is impossible. No organism can thrive
whose various limbs are ever shrinking in upon themselves. There is
no life except by living to others.
But the prophet covers the whole evil when he says that the _pious
are perished out of the land_. _Pious_ is a translation of despair.
The original means the man distinguished by "ḥesedh," that word which
we have on several occasions translated _leal love_, because it
implies not only an affection but loyalty to a relation. And, as the
use of the word frequently reminds us, "ḥesedh" is love and loyalty
both to God and to our fellow-men. We need not dissociate these: they
are one. But here it is the human direction in which the word looks.
It means a character which fulfils all the relations of society with
the fidelity, generosity and grace, which are the proper affections
of man to man. Such a character, says the prophet, is perished from
the land. Every man now lives for himself, and as a consequence preys
upon his brother. _They all lie in wait for blood; they hunt every
man his brother with a net._ This is not murder which the prophet
describes: it is the reckless, pitiless competition of the new
conditions of life developed in Judah by the long peace and commerce
of the eighth century. And he carries this selfishness into a very
striking figure in ver. 4: _The best of them is as a thorn thicket,
the most upright_ worse _than a prickly hedge_. He realises exactly
what we mean by sharpness and sharp-dealing: bristling self-interest,
all points; splendid in its own defence, but barren of fruit, and
without nest or covert for any life.
FOOTNOTES:
[904] See above, pp. 370 ff.
[905] Probably a later parenthesis. The word תושׁיה is one which,
unusual in the prophets, the Wisdom literature has made its own Prov.
ii. 7, xviii. 1; Job v. 12, etc. For _Thy_ LXX. read _His_.
[906] Translation of LXX. emended by Wellhausen so as to read העיר
מועד, the עיר being obtained by taking and transferring the עוד of
the next verse, and relieving that verse of an unusual formation,
viz. עוד before the interrogative האש. But for an instance of עוד
preceding an interrogative see Gen. xix. 12.
[907] The text of the two preceding verses, which is acknowledged to
be corrupt, must be corrected by the undoubted 3rd feminine suffix
in this one--"_her_ rich men." Throughout the reference must be to
the city. We ought therefore to change האזכה of ver. 11 into התזכה,
which agrees with the LXX. δικαιωθήσεται. Ver. 10 is more uncertain,
but for the same reason that "the city" is referred to throughout vv.
9-12, it is possible that it is the nominative to זעומה; translate
"cursed with the short measure." Again for אצרות LXX. read אֹצְרוֹת
אוֹצֶרֶת, to which also the city would be nominative. And this
suggests the query whether in the letters בית האש, that make little
sense as they stand in the Massoretic Text, there was not originally
another feminine participle. The recommendation of a transformation
of this kind is that it removes the abruptness of the appearance of
the 3rd feminine suffix in ver. 12.
[908] The word is found only here. The stem יחשׁ is no doubt the same
as the Arabic verb waḥash, which in Form V. means "Inami ventre fuit
præ fame; vacuum reliquit stomachum" (Freytag). In modern colloquial
Arabic waḥsha means a "longing for an absent friend."
[909] Jussive. The objects removed can hardly be goods, as Hitzig and
others infer; for it is to _the sword_ they afterwards fall. They
must be persons.
[910] LXX. _Zimri_.
[911] So LXX.; but Heb. _My people_.
[912] Uncertain.
[913] Cf. Prov. xv. 19.
[914] Roorda, by rearranging letters and clauses (some of them
after LXX.), and by changing points, gets a reading which may be
rendered: _For evil are their hands! To do good the prince demandeth
a bribe, and the judge, for the reward of the great, speaketh what
he desireth. And they entangle the good more than thorns, and the
righteous more than a thorn hedge._
[915] Cf. Isa. xxii. 5.