This is an adapted excerpt from the Concordia Commentary on Micah by Jason R Soenkensen.
Up until the late nineteenth century, the book of Micah was regarded as the work of the prophet Micah of the eighth century BC. Jeppesen surveys the progression of critical views on the book in detail, but included here are a few highlights. In his second edition of Die Propheten des Alten Bundes, Ewald estimated that chapters 6–7 did not come from the prophet Micah. In an 1881 article, Stade theorized an even smaller corpus of genuine material; it included chapters 1–3 with the exception of 2:12–13.25 Marti affirmed the positions of his predecessors but further limited the corpus of Micah’s material, excluding 1:2–5a, 7, 10–15; 2:5; and 3:3b.