Micah 1:10-16 - Make yourselves bald!

1:10-16

These verses start a lament. The text is actually quite difficult to work out, and no one is absolutely sure what it says, as many of the towns mentioned are unknown. The most common interpretation is that these towns lay outside Jerusalem. They hoped for good to come from Jerusalem (v12), but instead disaster came to Jerusalem and these towns were caught up in the Assyrian onslaught. Great suffering was to come upon the region. There are a number of wordplays in what Micah says. Beth Aphrah (or Ophrah, or el-aphrah) means “house of dust” and she is told to roll in the dust. Shaphir means beautiful or pleasant, she would be shamed. Zanaan sounds like the Hebrew for “come out” and she is told not to come out.  Achzib means lie or deception and she would be a lie to the kings of Israel. We miss these points because we are not reading in the original language, and even having a commentary or Bible footnotes point these things out fails to really bring it home to us. This is an argument in favour of the dynamic approach to Bible translation (NLT), which seeks to capture the meaning sometimes at the expense of the original text, whereas formal translations (ESV, NASB) which places emphasis on translating the original words. One might even say it provides some justification for “translations” like the Message. In fact go and read the Message version of Micah 1:10-16, you will see that it completely changes the names of the towns mentioned, but there is a reason for this, and the “translation” it gives is actually seeking to capture the way the original hearers would have received the message. Whether it succeeds in this or not is debatable, but at least we should appreciate what it is trying to do and why. What we can be certain about is that there is no such thing as a perfect translation.