The pairing with Parashah Balak, whose entire narrative concerns King Balak of Moab hiring the seer Balaam to curse Israel and Balaam instead blessing them repeatedly against his own paying client's wishes, rests on the most explicit possible reference available anywhere in this account: Micah names both Balak and Balaam directly, instructing the people to remember what Balak counseled and what Balaam answered him, treating the episode as settled proof of God's determination to protect Israel regardless of what hostile powers attempt against them.
Where the parashah tells the episode as a strange and almost comic narrative, a hired prophet increasingly unable to say anything but blessing however hard his patron pushes him toward a curse, the haftarah cites it centuries later as serious legal evidence in a formal courtroom style argument, God building a case for the nation's ingratitude by pointing to a specific historical moment when protection was extended even against determined outside hostility.
The haftarah's closing summary, that God requires justice, mercy and humility rather than elaborate sacrifice, gives the parashah's strange episode of a paid curse turned into blessing a moral center it does not spell out for itself: Balaam's repeated blessings occur not because of any ritual or payment but because genuine favor cannot be purchased or coerced, precisely the point Micah's closing verse makes explicit about what God actually values.