What Does Micah 1:5 Mean?
All this is through the rebellion of Jacob, and through the missed marks of the house of Israel. What is the rebellion of Jacob? Is it not Samaria? And what are the high places of Judah? Are they not Jerusalem?
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
For the transgression of Jacob is all this, and for the sins of the house of Israel. What is the transgression of Jacob? is it not Samaria? and what are the high places of Judah? are they not Jerusalem?THE KEY
Micah makes rebellion visible by naming the capitals where it takes civic form: Samaria for Jacob and Jerusalem for Judah.
THE MEANING
The verse speaks to you about a rupture that is not hidden in private intention: it is embodied in Samaria, while Judah’s high places are named as Jerusalem. Its two words hold both breaking away and missing, locating the fracture in the centers of communal life.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The lie that a city’s religious or national importance places it beyond accountability dissolves here: Jerusalem itself is named among Judah’s high places.
THE ROOT
פֶּשַׁע
peshaʿ
GROWS FROM
פ־ש־ע
p-sh-ʿ
Rebellion; breaking away.
פֶּשַׁע names rebellion or a breaking away. The related verb means “to rebel,” so Micah’s charge is a rupture that can be seen in the centers of public life named in the verse.
ALSO GROWS
pāshaʿ: To rebel, break away.
פָּשַׁע
The verb makes the noun’s rebellion an active rupture, which Micah locates in the life of the people.
pōsheʿîm: Rebels; those who break away.
פֹּשְׁעִים
This form names people by the same root, showing how the rupture described here can characterize a whole community.
חַטֹּאות
ḥaṭṭāʾôt
GROWS FROM
ח־ט־א
ḥ-ṭ-ʾ
To miss, err, or fail.
“missed marks” in this verse is ḥaṭṭāʾôt. The word for “sins” grows from a root meaning to miss or err, while the verse also names rebellion with פֶּשַׁע. Together they give the community’s condition two textures: missing and breaking away.
ALSO GROWS
ḥāṭāʾ: To miss, err, or do wrong.
חָטָא
The verb shows the root as an action, giving “sins” the sense of repeated misses or errors.
ḥaṭṭāʾt: Sin; wrongdoing, and in some contexts a sin offering.
חַטָּאת
This related noun carries the same root into the language of sin, linking the verse’s plural charge to the root idea of missing.
THE PATTERN
A community’s rupture becomes visible in the public centers that embody its life.
How has the steady city become a harlot! She was filled with justice, alignment lodged in her, but now murderers.O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I wanted to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you would not!For her shortcomings have clung as high as heaven, and God has remembered her crookedness.THE THREAD
Hear and respond, O heavens, and bend your ear, O earth, for the LORD has spoken. I have raised children and lifted them high, and they have broken away from me.Isaiah uses the same פ־ש־ע root in the verb translated “rebelled.” Micah names that rebellion in Samaria and Jerusalem, linking the act of breaking away with the public centers where a people’s life takes shape.
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