Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/238

Rh 224 M I C M I C both men and women, are shorter and darker complexioned than the Chinese, their faces also are rounder and their features sharper. In disposition, too, they are very unlike their civilized neighbours. They are brave, passionate, suspicious, revengeful, and indifferent to cold and hunger ; they are free and easy in their manners, and are as noisily joyous as the Chinese are grave and sedate. They are divided into between forty and fifty clans, each of which is distinguished by a name which is generally derived either from some physical characteristic, or from some custom, or from the habitat of the clan, as, for example, &quot;The Black Miau,&quot; &quot;the narrow-headed Miau,&quot; so named from their manner of dressing their hair, &quot;the six- valley Miau,&quot; &c. Among these clans there exist wide differences of culture, some being in no way removed from savages, while others who have been brought under the influence of Chinese civilization show themselves apt and ready learners. Very few of them, so far as is known, possess any written records. The Yaou-jin, or Goblin clan, are said to have books, which, though they are now unable to read, they still regard with reverent awe. &quot;The barbarous characters &quot; used in these books are, according to a Chinese writer, &quot;like knotted worms, and are utterly unintelligible.&quot; The Ko-los also are said to be a lettered clan, but for the most part the Miautse content themselves with conveying information and preserving records by means of notched sticks. Their language as well as their ethnic characteristics prove them to be closely related to the Siamese, Anamese, Cambodians, and the inhabitants of Hainan ; in fact they form part of the race which is spread over the whole of south-eastern Indo-China. Their social customs are as widely different as their appearance is from those of the Chinese. The widest latitude is given to the youth of both sexes in the choice of their husbands and wives. As among the hill tribes of Chittagong, the selection is commonly made on the mountainside, where on moon light nights in the &quot;leaping month &quot; the young men and maidens meet to sing or to play at ball, or to dance round the &quot;devil s staff&quot; ( Anglice, Maypole), and to choose their partners for life. Amongsome clans the &quot;couvade&quot; is an established custom. Their funeral rites vary according to the districts, those living within reach of the influ ence of the Chinese having adopted their customs, while those more remote still hang their dead in baskets from trees, or lay them in the ground and disinter them yearly to wash their bones. In dress they are fond of bright colours, and commonly wear loose but short jackets, sometimes with and sometimes without trousers. The men wear turbans wound round their hair, which is raised above the head in the shape of a spiral shell, and the women either don a kind of cap, or dress their hair in the shape of a ram s horn. For many years the relations of the Miautse with the Chinese Govern ment have been generally of a peaceable nature, and in the Peking Gazette of April 1881 there was published a new system of government by which it is hoped that the incorporation of the mountaineers into the empire may become more real and complete. See Sketchesofthe Miau-tsze, translated by E.G. Bridgman ; J. Edkins. The Miau- tsi Tribes, their History; and -Quaint customs in Kwei-chow,&quot; Cornhill Magazine, January 1872. MICAH ( &quot;I? 11 *?) is the short form of a name which in various modifications Mlcdidhu, Mlcdiehu, Micdiah is common in the Old Testament, expressing as it does a fundamental point of Hebrew faith : Who is like Jehovah 1 The name was borne among others by the Danite whose history is given in Judg. xvii. sq., by the prophet who opposed Ahab s expedition to Ramoth-Gilead (1 Kings xxii.), and by the subject of the present article, the con temporary and fellow-worker of Isaiah, whose name is prefixed to the sixth in order of the books of the minor prophets. 1 It is at once apparent that the book of Micah divides itself into at least two distinct discourses, chap. vi. 1 forming a new commencement ; and from what we know in general of the compilation of the prophetic collection we cannot at once determine whether the second discourse, which has no title, is to be ascribed to the author of the immediately preceding prophecy, or is to be regarded as an independent and anonymous piece. To decide this question, if it can be decided, we must begin by a separate study of the earlier chapters to which the title in Micah i. 1 directly belongs. These again fall into two parts. Chaps, i.-iii. (with the exception of two verses, ii. 12, 13) are a predic- 1 A confusion between the two prophets of the name has led to the insertion in the Massoretic text of 1 Kings xxii. 28 of a citation from Micah i. 2, rightly absent from the LXX. tion of judgment on the sins of Judah and Ephraim. In a majestic exordium Jehovah Himself is represented as coming forth in the thunderstorm (comp. Amos i. 2) from His heavenly palace, and descending on the mountains of Palestine, at once as witness against His people, and the executer of judgment on their sins. Samaria is sentenced to destruction for idolatry ; and the blow extends to Judah also, which participates in the same guilt (chap. i.). But, while Samaria is summarily dismissed, the sin of Judah is analysed at length in chaps, ii. and iii., in which the prophet no longer deals with idolatry, but with the corruption of society, and particularly of its leaders the grasping aristocracy whose whole energies are concentrated on devouring the poor and depriving them of their little holdings, the unjust judges and priests who for gain wrest the law in favour of the rich, the hireling and gluttonous prophets who make war against every one &quot;that putteth not into their mouth,&quot; but are ever ready with assurances of Jehovah s favour to their patrons, the wealthy and noble sinners that fatten on the flesh of the poor. The prophet speaks with the strongest personal sympathy of the sufferings of the peasantry at the hands of their lords, and contemplates with stern satisfaction the approach of the destroyer who shall carry into exile &quot; the luxurious sons&quot; of this race of petty tyrants (i. 16), and leave them none to stretch the measuring line on a field in the congregation of Jehovah (ii. 5). The centre of corrup tion is the capital, the city of Zion, grown great on the blood and wrongs of the provincials, the seat of the cruel princes, the corrupt judges and diviners. For their sake, he concludes, Zion shall be plowed as a field, Jerusalem shall lie in ruins, and the temple hill return to jungle (iii. 12). The situation thus sketched receives its elucidation from the data supplied by the title (i. 1) and confirmed and rendered more precise by a remarkable passage in Jeremiah. According to the title Micah flourished in the reigns of Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah ; according to Jeremiah (xxvi. 18 sq.) the prophecy of the destruction of Jerusalem just cited was spoken under Hezekiah, and bore fruit in the repentance of king and people, by which the judgment was averted. The allusion beyond doubt is to Hezekiah s work of religious reformation (2 Kings xviii. 4 sq.). It is hardly possible to separate this reformation from the influ ence of Isaiah, which did not become practical in the conduct of the state till the crisis of Sennacherib s invasion ; and the conclusion that Hezekiah was not from the first a reforming king, which is forced on us by many passages of Isaiah, is confirmed by the prophecy of Micah, which, after Hezekiah s accession, still represents wickedness as seated in the high places of the kingdom. The internal disorders of the realm depicted by Micah are also prominent in Isaiah s prophecies ; they were closely connected, not only with the foreign complications due to the approach of the Assyrians, but with the break-up of the old agrarian system within Israel, and with the rapid and uncompen- sated aggrandisement of the nobles during those pro sperous years when the conquest of Edom by Amaziali and the occupation of the port of Elath by his son (2 Kings xiv. 7, 22) placed the lucrative trade between the Mediterranean and the lied Sea in the hands of the rulers of Judah. On the other hand the democratic tone which distinguishes Micah from Isaiah, and his announcement of the impending fall of the capital (the deliverance of which from the Assyrian appears to Isaiah as the necessary condition for the preservation of the seed of a new and better kingdom), are explained by the fact that, while Isaiah lived in the centre of affairs, Micah was a Morasthite or inhabitant of Moresheth Gath, a place near the Philistine frontier so unimportant as to be mentioned