The prophet shows the cause of this punishment. Transgression; better, apostasy, which the people's trangression really was. Jacob. Here the ten tribes and Judah—the whole of the covenant people. In the latter part of the verse the term includes only the ten tribes, called often Israel or Ephraim.
All this. The manifestation of God's power and wrath described in Micah 1:3 and Micah 1:4. The house of Israel. The ten tribes. Is it not Samaria? She is naught but sin. He names the capitals of the two kingdoms as the source and centre of the idolatry and wickedness which pervaded the whole country.
Samaria was built by Omri, a king who "wrought evil in the eyes of the Lord, and did worse than all that were before him;" and in it his son Ahab erected a temple to Baal (1 Kings 16:32), and it became the chief seat of idolatry in the land.
What are the high places? The prophet seems to say that Jerusalem is no longer the Lord's sanctuary, but a collection of unauthorized or idolatrous shrines. These were buildings or altars erected in conspicuous spots, contrary to the enactments of the Mosaic Law (Deuteronomy 12:11-14), and used more or less for idolatrous worship.
With a strange perversity, the Jews mixed the pure service of Jehovah with the rites of heathen deities. Even the best kings of Judah were unable wholly to suppress these local sanctuaries (see 2 Kings 12:3; 2 Kings 14:4, etc.
). They were found even in Jerusalem itself (Jeremiah 32:35), especially in the time of Ahaz (2 Kings 16:4). The parallelism of this clause with the preceding being thought defective ("high places" being not parallel with "apostasy"), the Septuagint reads, ἡ ἁμαρτία, "the sin," followed by the Syriac and the Targum.
One Hebrew manuscript confirms the reading; but it is probably unauthorized, and has been ignorantly introduced The prophet defines the sins of Samaria and Jerusalem. The sin of the former is apostasy; that of the latter, unauthorized worship.
Instead of "what" in both places the Hebrew gives "who," implying that there is a personal cause, the two capitals being personified. Hezekiah's partial reformation had not taken place when this was uttered.