Micah 6:8 in context

Micah 6:8 answers one of the oldest questions a person can ask: what does God want from me? If you have ever worried that you could never do enough to please God, this verse meets you with a surprising gentleness. It says that God has already shown you what is good, and what God asks is within reach of any person: to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.

What does Micah 6:8 say?

He has told you, O mortal, what is good, and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God?

Micah 6:8, NRSVUE

“O mortal” translates the Hebrew adam, the ordinary word for a human being.¹ The verse is addressed to Israel, and its wording speaks to any person who asks what God requires.

What comes before Micah 6:8?

Micah 6 is staged like a trial. God calls the mountains to listen, “for the LORD has a case against his people” (Micah 6:2). God opens the case with a question that sounds more hurt than angry:

“O my people, what have I done to you? In what have I wearied you? Answer me! For I brought you up from the land of Egypt and redeemed you from the house of slavery.…”

Micah 6:3–4, NRSVUE

God reminds the people of what God has done for them first: the exodus, the leaders God gave them, and the “righteous acts of the LORD” (Micah 6:5). Grace comes before requirement.

Then a worshiper answers, and the offers grow more and more extreme:

“With what shall I come before the Lord and bow myself before God on high?… Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?”

Micah 6:6–7, NRSVUE

The worshiper moves from calves to thousands of rams to rivers of oil to a child, like someone who fears that nothing will ever be enough. Micah 6:8 cuts through all of it. God has already told you what is good, and it cannot be bought.

Who was the prophet Micah?

The book opens by placing him in history: “The LORD’s word that came to Micah of Morasheth in the days of Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah” (Micah 1:1). Those kings ruled Judah in the late 700s BCE and into the early 600s. Moresheth was a small town in the countryside of Judah, and Micah is often described as a voice for rural people against the powerful in the capital.

He condemned people who “covet fields and seize them, and houses, then take them away” (Micah 2:2), and leaders who “judge for bribes” while saying, “Isn’t the LORD among us?” (Micah 3:11). A century later, people in Jerusalem still remembered his warning that Zion would be “plowed as a field” and quoted it in Jeremiah’s defense (Jeremiah 26:18). Scholars debate whether Micah himself spoke chapter 6 or whether it comes from a later prophet in his tradition. Either way, the church receives it as the word of God.

What do justice, kindness, and walking humbly mean?

The first phrase, “to do justice,” uses the Hebrew word mishpat. It means fair judgment in courts and fair dealing in daily life, especially for people with little power: the poor, the widow, the orphan, and the foreigner. Isaiah gives a parallel list: “Seek justice. Relieve the oppressed. Defend the fatherless. Plead for the widow.” (Isaiah 1:17). Justice in Micah is something you do.

The second phrase, “to love kindness,” uses hesed, one of the great words of the Old Testament. It means loyal, generous, faithful love, the kind of love that keeps a promise when keeping it is costly. English Bibles often translate hesed as “steadfast love” or “loving kindness.” At the end of the book, Micah says that God “delights in loving kindness” (Micah 7:18), using the same word. God asks us to love what God loves. Micah asks you to love kindness, to delight in it as God does.

The third phrase, “to walk humbly with your God,” uses the Hebrew verb tsana, which means to be modest or humble. To “walk” in the Bible means to live day by day. Walking humbly with God means living in God’s company without pretending to be God, with a modest view of yourself and an attentive ear for God. Proverbs says, “with humility comes wisdom” (Proverbs 11:2).

Do other prophets say the same thing?

Yes. Prophets of Micah’s own century made the same appeal. Hosea wrote, “For I desire mercy, and not sacrifice; and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings” (Hosea 6:6), and the word for “mercy” there is hesed. Amos heard God reject Israel’s festivals and songs and demand instead:

But let justice roll down like water and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

Amos 5:24, NRSVUE

The prophets wanted worship and justice together. What they opposed was worship offered by people who cheated and oppressed their neighbors. Jesus stood in the same line when he told religious leaders that they had “left undone the weightier matters of the law: justice, mercy, and faith” (Matthew 23:23).

How do Jews read Micah 6:8?

The Babylonian Talmud, the great collection of rabbinic teaching and debate, treats Micah 6:8 as a summary of the whole Torah. In the tractate Makkot (page 24a), Rabbi Simlai teaches that Moses received 613 commandments, and that later prophets gathered them into fewer and fewer principles. “Micah came and reduced them to three,” the passage says, quoting Micah 6:8. The rabbis explained “to do justly” as maintaining justice, “to love mercy” as doing every kind of kindness for others, and walking humbly as joining funeral and wedding processions, acts of care for neighbors in their grief and in their joy.

How does Micah 6:8 relate to the greatest commandment?

Jesus summed up the law in two commandments: love God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself. “The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments,” he said (Matthew 22:37–40). Micah 6:8 says the same thing in three phrases. Justice and kindness are love of neighbor in action. Walking humbly with God is love of God in daily life.

Paul makes the same summary even shorter:

For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

Galatians 5:14, NRSVUE

Augustine of Hippo taught in On Christian Teaching that anyone who thinks they understand Scripture, but whose reading does not build up the twofold love of God and neighbor, has not yet understood it. Micah 6:8 and Galatians 5:14 are the kind of verses by which the church has tested every other reading. For more, see What is the greatest commandment? and What does 1 Corinthians 13 mean?

What does Micah 6:8 mean for you today?

Doing justice means paying fair wages, telling the truth, refusing bribes and shortcuts, and standing up for people who have no one to stand up for them. Scripture names the poor and the foreigner again and again; see What does the Bible say about the poor? and What does the Bible say about immigrants?

Loving kindness means keeping faith with people over the long haul: visiting the sick friend in the second month as well as the first, forgiving, and showing up. Walking humbly means praying, worshiping, and remembering that you are a creature and God is God, held every day in God’s care.

Micah also gave the church a picture of where all this leads, a world where nations “will beat their swords into plowshares,” where “every man will sit under his vine and under his fig tree. No one will make them afraid” (Micah 4:3–4). Justice, kindness, and humility are how God’s people begin to live in that world now.

One of the oldest Christian prayers outside the New Testament, from the letter Clement of Rome wrote to the church in Corinth around the end of the first century, asks God for the same justice and kindness Micah described:

We beseech Thee, Lord and Master, to be our help and succor. Save those among us who are in tribulation; have mercy on the lowly; lift up the fallen; show Thyself unto the needy; heal the ungodly; convert the wanderers of Thy people; feed the hungry; release our prisoners; raise up the weak; comfort the fainthearted.

1 Clement 59:4, translated by J. B. Lightfoot

Notes

1. Hebrew (Westminster Leningrad Codex): הִגִּ֥יד לְךָ֛ אָדָ֖ם מַה־טּ֑וֹב וּמָֽה־יְהוָ֞ה דּוֹרֵ֣שׁ מִמְּךָ֗ כִּ֣י אִם־עֲשׂ֤וֹת מִשְׁפָּט֙ וְאַ֣הֲבַת חֶ֔סֶד וְהַצְנֵ֥עַ לֶ֖כֶת עִם־אֱלֹהֶֽיךָ׃ Adam means “human being”; asot mishpat, “to do justice”; ahavat hesed, literally “love of hesed” (loyal, steadfast kindness); hatsnea lekhet, “to walk humbly” or “to walk modestly.” ↩︎