Free Study Guide IncludedMicah: A Friends Illuminated Commentary
"What does the Lord require of thee?" Micah's call to justice, mercy, and humble walking with God became a defining text for the Quaker peace testimony and the movement's social witness.
- 7 chapters · ~15,000 words
- EPUB + Study Guide
This edition
Read itE-book · EPUB
- Time to read55 minutes
- Length13,193 words
- Files1 EPUB, DRM-free
How we get 55 minutes
This figure is here so you can compare one book against another. Every title on the site is timed from its own word count at the same reading speed — nothing is adjusted book by book — so if this edition says 55 minutes and another says half that, the second one really is about half the reading. It is a measure of size, in the way a page count is. Your own pace is your own: at the speeds typical adult readers actually manage, this edition runs anywhere from 44 minutes to 1.3 hours.
What is in this edition
| Modernized text | 13,193 words |
|---|---|
| Total | 13,193 words |
Counted from the text of the EPUB you receive. Navigation, the title page, the table of contents and the licence page are excluded — they are packaging, not reading.
The reading rate
238 words per minute, for adult silent reading of non-fiction, applied unchanged to every title on the site. We did not pick the number; it is the pooled result of a published meta-analysis. Nothing is adjusted book by book — that consistency is what makes two of these figures worth comparing.
Brysbaert, M. (2019). How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate. Journal of Memory and Language, 109, 104047. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2019.104047
190 studies, 18,573 participants.
The same paper puts most adult readers between 175 and
300 words per minute, and those two speeds give the
44 minutes and 1.3 hours above.
Because time is words divided by speed, an even range of speeds produces an
uneven range of times, so 55 minutes sits nearer the fast end of that
range than the middle of it.
If it were a paperback
Roughly 38–53 pages.
Words per printed page is a typesetting convention, not a measurement — it moves with trim size, type size and leading. The range above assumes 250–350 words a page. Friends Illuminated publishes no print edition of this book; the figure is here only because pages are a more familiar size than words.
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About This Edition
Micah 6:8 — “He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God” — is perhaps the most quoted verse in Quaker history after John 1:9. This brief prophetic book concentrates into seven chapters a vision of the just society that early Friends took as their mandate: the condemnation of rulers who devour the poor, the critique of false prophets who prophesy for profit, and the profound peace vision of every person sitting under their own vine and fig tree with none to make them afraid. Friends returned to Micah when they needed the prophetic tradition’s clearest statement of what faithfulness requires.
This commentary is shorter than others in the series, reflecting Micah’s brevity, but it is packed with quotation and cross-reference — showing how deeply this small book shaped Quaker preaching, social testimony, and devotional life. The free Group Study Guide is particularly well-suited to discussions of the Quaker testimonies of simplicity, peace, integrity, community, and equality, using Micah as a biblical foundation.
