Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Micah · About this commentary
A Day for Building Your Walls
Micah 7:11-13
11 A day to build your walls! In that day, he will extend your boundary. · WEB
Three verses of restoration are followed by one that refuses to cancel the judgment, and the order is deliberate.
Verse 11 is a shout rather than a sentence — a day for building your walls, and on that day the boundary pushed far out. The city that was to be plowed as a field Micah 3:12 is given masons.
Verse 12 describes who arrives, and the geography is drawn as wide as the writer's world could reach: from ASSYRIA and the cities of EGYPT , from Egypt to the River, from sea to sea and mountain to mountain. These are the two empires the book has feared throughout, and here they are named as points of departure rather than of invasion.
Then verse 13 does something a smoother book would not do. The land will still be desolate, on account of those living in it, for the fruit of their doings. The restoration announced two verses earlier is not withdrawn, and the ruin is not withdrawn either; they are simply set down beside one another with no attempt to time them.
This is the pattern of all three of the book's addresses, stated here at its sharpest. Hope never arrives by canceling what was said before it. It arrives after, and the reader is left to hold both.
held with reason What this mark means