Micah 4:10

Be in pain, and labour to bring forth, O daughter of Zion, like a woman in travail,.... Bear thy troubles and calamities, sufferings and sorrows, patiently, and expect deliverance from them, as a

Be in pain, and labour to bring forth, O daughter of Zion, like a woman in travail: for now shalt thou go forth out of the city, and thou shalt dwell in the field, and thou shalt go even to Babylon;

Be in pain, and labour to bring forth; it may be read, Thou shalt be in pain, and thou shalt labour, &c.; so it will be a prediction of the troubles, sorrows, and dangers that they shall meet with in the wars against the Babylonians, and in their captivity under them. O daughter of Zion; all the house of Judah, particularly you that dwell in Jerusalem and near Mount Zion. Like a woman in travail; whose sorrows are very sharp, but somewhat mitigated by expectation of a good delivery, and the birth of a living child: let your hopes so mitigate your sorrows too. For now; ere long, within a few years, you will see or hear that Israel is carried captive (which Micah lived to see): this may be an admonition, it is certainly a token that you shall be captives too; and this came upon them one hundred and thirty years after, when in Zedekiah’ s time the daughter of Zion was deplorably wasted, conquered, and captivated by Nebuchadnezzar. Thou shalt go forth out of the city; forced thereto by the prevailing power of the Babylonians, who took Zedekiah and those that accompanied him when they stole out of the city: these did go out when they could keep in it no longer. Thou shalt dwell in the field; as conquered, made prisoners, and held so in the fields under a strong guard, until all the conquered were brought together, that they might in one body be led away. In their journey to Babylon they were forced to lodge in the fields, also exposed to all the inconveniencies of heat in the day and of cold in the night, weary, hungry, thirsty, and faint near to death. Thou shalt go even to Babylon; O daughter of Zion, thou shalt certainly be carried captive to Babylon, where thy dwelling shall be little bettered, thou shalt dwell by the river, without the city. There shalt thou be delivered; by Cyrus first, and by Darius Hystaspes next, and by Artaxerxes in Nehemiah’ s time; all this as type of a greater deliverance. The Lord; the everlasting God, thy God, whose servants the Persian kings that favoured the Jews were, and by whose motion they did incline to release them. Shall redeem; the Hebrew word points out a redemption by the next kinsman, and so fairly minds us of the Messiah, the great Redeemer of the church. And to him, and the redemption of the church by him, do these deliverances ultimately and principally point. From the hand of thine enemies; who would have detained the people of God longer in slavery, or who would have hindered the rebuilding of the temple, and the re-establishment of the worship of God. Proportionably to this type doth the antitype answer, ,75.

Micah 4:10 Be in pain, and labour to bring forth, O daughter of Zion, like a woman in travail: for now shalt thou go forth out of the city, and thou shalt dwell in the field, and thou shalt go [even] to Babylon; there shalt thou be delivered; there the LORD shall redeem thee from the hand of thine enemies.Ver. 10. Be in pain and labour to briny forth, &c.] Be sensible of thine ensuing captivity, and take on; but yet with hope of a gracious deliverance in due time. It is no less a fault to despise the chastening of the Lord than to faint when thou art rebuked, Hebrews 12:5. The hypocrite in heart heapeth up wrath, saith Elihu, and why? he crieth not when God bindeth him, Job 36:13. The wicked, saith Hannah, are silent in darkness, and shall therefore lie down in sorrow, 1 Samuel 2:9 Isaiah 50:10. This is not patience, but pertinace, the strength of stones and flesh of brass, Job 6:12. It is not valour, but apathy, stupidity, and indolence, much complained of in Scripture, and threatened with a succession of sorrows, Leviticus 26:18; Leviticus 26:28, seven more, and seven more, and seven to that. Three times in that chapter God raiseth his note of threatening, and he raiseth it by sevens, and those are discords in music. Such sayings will be heavy, songs, and their execution heavy pangs; worse than those of a woman in travail. For now shalt thou go forth out of the city] This now occured not out of a hundred years after. Foul weather seldom rotteth in the air. Time weareth not out God’ s threatenings, Nullum tempus occurrit Regi, nedum Deo: Time can be no prejudice to the Ancient of days; sooner or later his word shall be accomplished. When the sins of the Amorites are full they shall be sure of their payment. The bottle of wickedness, when once filled with those bitter waters, will sink to the bottom. And thou shalt dwell in the field] Sub dio, under daylight, having no canopy over thee but the azured sky; so little account is made of poor captives: if they may have the open air to breathe in, though they lie without doors, it is better than a stinking dungeon, or to be shut up close under hatches among the excrements of nature, as Barbarossa’ s Christian prisoners taken in Greece were; so that all the way as he went home with them to Constantinople, every hour almost some of them were cast dead overboard. And thou shalt go even to Babylon] There to dwell among plants and hedges, making flowerpots for a foreign prince. "There they dwelt with the king for his work," 1 Chronicles 4:23. There shalt thou be delivered, there the Lord shall redeem thee] This "there" is as emphatic as that "yet" so often repeated Zechariah 1:17. It seemed improbable to many, and to some impossible, that ever they should return out of Babylon.

(10) Thou shalt go even to Babylon.—This prediction has naturally caused difficulty to those who doubt the power of prophets to prophesy: for Babylon was not at all considered in the days of Micah, when Assyria was in the ascendant. It was a century after Micah’s time before Babylon recovered its ancient dignity. The fact, however, remains that Micah wrote, “Thou shalt go to Babel;” and there is the other fact, that the people of Judah (not Israel) did go. Micah also declared, “THERE shalt thou be delivered:” and in the time of Cyrus the Jews were delivered there. The repetition, “There . . . there,” is emphatic.

Verse 10. There shalt thou be delivered] There God shall meet thee; and by redeeming thee from thy captivity, bringing thee back to thine own land, and finally converting thee unto himself, shall deliver thee from the burden of grief and wo which thou now bearest, and under which thou dost groan.

10. Be in pain, &c.] There is no remedy for Zion’s distress. Having sinned, she must bear her punishment. Having lost her first purity, she must be refined. for now shalt thou go forth] ‘Now,’ because the future is realized by the prophet as if present. To heighten the effect of his announcement, he describes one by one the stages of the calamity,—the going out of the city, the dwelling in the open country, houseless and unprotected, and lastly the coming to Babylon, the scene of captivity. To ‘go forth’=to surrender, as Isaiah 36:16, 2 Kings 24:12. and thou shalt go even to Babylon] These words are very difficult, when viewed in relation to the context. For 1, the enemy, whose destruction the prophet anticipates, is the contemporary kingdom of Assyria (see Micah 5:6), not that of Babylon, which had in fact been conquered by Tiglath-Pileser, and only succeeded to the place and power of Assyria a century later; and 2, we read in Micah 4:12 that Jehovah has brought the hostile nations to Jerusalem that they may be destroyed there, which seems not to allow space for a transportation of the Judζans to Babylon. Thus the difficulty in admitting that Micah really foretold the Babylonian captivity is based on purely exegetical grounds. It has indeed been replied 1, that Babylon is here mentioned only as a province of the Assyrian empire, and 2, that it appears from 2 Kings 17:24 (confirmed by the Annals of Sargon, Records of the Past, vii. 29), that Sargon transported a part of the rebellious population of Babylonia to N. Israel, which we may presume that, according to the custom of the Assyrians, he replaced by captive Israelites. It is therefore quite conceivable that in foretelling an invasion of Judah by Sargon, the prophet might represent the captives of Judah as following their Israelitish brethren to Babylonia. This reply is perhaps adequate as against the first-mentioned difficulty, but it leaves the second in its full force. It is necessary therefore to assume either that these words, ‘and thou shalt go to Babylon,’ are the interpolation of a later editor of the prophetic writings, who overlooked or misunderstood the context, or that they represent a subsequent revelation made by the Spirit of prophecy to Micah himself. The former view is perhaps at first sight objectionable, because it assumes that Divine Providence has not watched over the text of the Scriptures so as to prevent alterations from being made in their original form. But we must remember that the permanent function of the Old Testament for Christians is simply to point to Jesus Christ, as the Saviour both of Jew and of Gentile, and that no superficial changes of the text are of any religious importance which leave the performance of this function unimparied. The hypothesis of interpolation is confirmed (to mention the principal evidence only) by the occurrence of closely analogous words, undoubtedly interpolated, in the Septuagint version of Mic 4:8, the second part of which runs thus, καὶεἰσεύσεταιἡἀρχὴἡπρώτη, βασιλείαἐκΒαβυλῶνοςτῇθυγατρὶἹερουσαλήμ.

Be in pain, and labor to bring forth - (Literally, Writhe and burst forth,) as if to say, “thou must suffer, but thy suffering and thy joy shall be one. Thou canst not have the joy without the suffering.

Distress and subsequent redemption, Micah 4:9-10.The distant future, the prophet is convinced, will be all brightness and glory, but in the immediate future he can see nothing but gloom and despair.