Biblion Bible Commentary
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Bethlehem Ephrathah
Micah 5:1-4
1 Now you shall gather yourself in troops, daughter of troops. He has laid siege against us. They will strike the judge of Israel with a rod on the cheek. · WEB
A ruler is promised from the smallest place named so far, and the passage is careful about what it claims for his origin.
Verse 1 leaves the judge of Israel struck on the cheek with a rod, the humiliation of a whole office. Verse 2 answers from an unexpected direction: not the capital but Bethlehem Ephrathah, too small to count among the units of Judah. The book has spent a chapter and a half on what two capitals cost their people, and the replacement comes from a village, as the writer of the book did.
Translations divide here, and the division is worth naming. The Hebrew word can mean thousands or the clans those units were named for, and this book uses it plainly for thousands in the next chapter Micah 6:7. A first-century citation reads it a third way, as rulers, and adds a line about shepherding taken from verse 4 Matthew 2:6.
The last clause is often pressed harder than its vocabulary allows. His goings out are from of old, from ancient days — and this book uses that expression of the oath sworn to the fathers Micah 7:20, where it means the patriarchal past. What the verse establishes is an origin running back far behind a birth in a village. It is not where Scripture argues his eternity, and a single text does not have to carry everything.
Verse 3 sets a term: abandonment until the one in labor gives birth. Verse 4 says what he does on arrival, and it is not conquest but shepherding.
held with reason What this mark means