1. the mountains, / . . . the hills. These are conventionally exhorted to listen to the discourse at the beginning of biblical poems. Here, they are called upon to act as witnesses in a legal contestation between God and the Judahites.

3. do you in. The basic meaning of this verbal stem in its intransitive form is “to be unable.” Some opt here for its secondary meaning, “to exhaust.”

5. Balak. His story is told in Numbers 22–24. Balak hired Balaam as a professional seer to put a hex on Israel but instead, following God’s bidding, Balaam blessed them.

from Shittim to Gilgal. These are, respectively, the last way station of the Israelites east of the Jordan and their first encampment after crossing the Jordan.

6. With what shall I come before the LORD. Although some interpreters prefer to link this with what precedes, it looks like a new literary unit.

7. Is the LORD pleased with thousands of rams. There is a pattern of intensification in these lines: first, simply burnt offerings and yearlings; then, in a hyperbolic flourish, thousands of rams and tens of thousands of streams of oil; and, in the crowning extravagance, child sacrifice—the most a person can give.

8. It was told to you. The Hebrew seems to say “he told you,” and almost all interpreters assume the implied subject of the verb is God. But third-person singular verbs are often used as the equivalent of the passive, and the passive makes smoother sense in this line, obviating the necessity to have “the LORD” here tell what the LORD demands in the next verset.

only doing justice and loving kindness / and walking humbly with your God. This is a succinct and especially beautiful expression of the view Micah shares with Isaiah that ethical behavior is far more important than the mechanics of sacrificial rites.

9. a man of insight shall see Your name. From this point through to verse 14, textual problems abound. “A man” is added in this translation as an interpretive guess. The expression “see Your name” might mean something like “recognize Your power,” but it remains obscure.

Heed the rod. One surmises this is “the rod of wrath” that recurs in Prophetic literature.

who brought it about. This may mean that the addressee is responsible for the disaster that has overtaken the people, but that is conjectural.

10. Can there. The Hebrew haʾish, with no medial yod, is odd, but Shmuel Vergon has made a persuasive case that it is archaic orthography for hayeish, and he cites a clear instance of this spelling in 2 Samuel 14:19 (“there is [ʾish] no turning right or left”).

short ephah. The literal sense is “an ephah of thinness,” that is, a measure used to shortchange the buyer.

11. Could I declare innocent. This translation reads, with the Vulgate, haʾazakeh, the transitive form of the verb, instead of the Masoretic haʾezkeh, “could I be innocent.”

14. your filth. The Hebrew term yeshaḥ occurs only here. This is the meaning scholars have proposed on the basis of an Arab cognate: the victim of the curse gets no satisfaction from what he eats and is unable to evacuate.

She will conceive. The grammar also allows this to be construed as “you will conceive,” but because the person addressed has been masculine, it may be preferable to understand this as an unspecified woman (your wife).

15. trample the olives. Olives, of course, are pressed, not trampled, but this is probably a simple extension of the idiom used for grapes.

get fermented juice. The verb is merely implied.

16. Omri. Along with Ahab, Omri is one of the monarchs of the northern kingdom singled out in the Book of Kings for his abominations.

and My people’s disgrace you shall bear. It is possible, though not entirely certain, that Micah is drawing a distinction between the person addressed in the prophecy, a stand-in for the whole group of malefactors who have lied and cheated and used false scales and measures, and “My people,” who have been victimized, reduced to disgrace, by this group.