Mining the Minors: Malachi (1)

The name Malachi appears exactly once in scripture, giving us no connection to the historical books of the Old Testament by which to identify or describe its very last recorded prophet. That’s unless you want to count John the Baptist as the last, and there’s a pretty good case to be made for him. Nevertheless, since our mission here has been to explore the twelve Minor Prophets, we’ll leave John out of it. Except we can’t. John is going to make a cameo appearance in Malachi’s final verses, making for about the neatest possible segue from Testament to Testament.

Go ahead, tell me the Bible is just a bunch of books cobbled together by human authors and editors.

Overview of Malachi

The Name

But that leaves Malachi essentially a cipher to the modern reader, a book title without a writer to associate with it. His name, or perhaps his pseudonym, comes from the Hebrew root mal'āḵ, which literally means “messenger” and figuratively “angel”. Malachi, then, means “my messenger”. Whether this was the man’s real name is a matter open to debate, leaning hard in the direction of “No”. Certainly, Malachi was not a common name in Israel. Nobody else is so designated in the entire Old Testament. Furthermore, the word mal'āḵ shows up three more times in these four chapters, making messengers of God almost a subtheme of the book. In all likelihood the choice of name is a deliberate play on words that obscures the prophet’s identity.

As always, any OT information void leads Jewish religious authorities to speculate wildly. Here, they do it about Malachi’s real identity. Some claim he was actually Ezra. Others say he was Mordechai of Esther fame. Both are quite unlikely, and there is not a shred of real evidence in support of either. Furthermore, God has not seen fit to disclose his identity, making discovering it a low priority for believers.

Dating the Prophecy

The general consensus among Bible scholars is that Malachi’s ministry occurred around the end of the fifth century BC. The evidence for this is primarily internal.

The prophecy is unquestionably post-exilic in its use of names for God’s people. The terms “Judah” and “Israel” are effectively synonyms in this book, a feature of post-exilic Jewish usage. (The term “Jacob” is also used, but that doesn’t help us pin down the timeframe.) Also, the Persian word for “governor” is used in 1:8, giving us a window of 538-333 BC, before and after which Persian would be a highly unlikely language to find in a Hebrew document.

Further, chapter 1’s comparison of Israel with Edom locates the prophecy after Edom’s destruction in the mid-sixth century BC at the hands of the Babylonians, but sometime prior to all of the residual Edomites settling permanently south of Judah in what became Idumea, having being driven westward by the Nabateans, who resettled Bozrah and Sela. At the time Malachi wrote, some Edomites may still have entertained the futile hope of rebuilding their shattered cities among the rocks southeast of Judah on the far side of the Dead Sea.

Finally, the second temple was in operation in Jerusalem (the prophet speaks of wishing to close its doors in chapter 1), but the priests had comprehensively corrupted their service. Under Ezra and later Nehemiah, there were still priests considered reliable and generous voluntary gift-giving. Both leaders had problems with the priesthood, but none so sweeping as those mentioned in Malachi. This suggests the prophet probably ministered after 443 BC, the thirty-second year of Artaxerxes and the last date mentioned in Nehemiah, when the leadership of the nation was less committed to holy, consistent living.

Debating an Overlap

Some commentators think Malachi’s prophetic career overlapped to some degree with the administrations of Ezra and Nehemiah, citing similar problems with the priesthood, intermarriage with the pagans, and failing to tithe properly. I think an overlap unlikely, and not just because Ezra and Nehemiah do not once mention Malachi or any other prophet we could reasonably identify with him.

The fact is that God rarely bypasses obedient human authority when it exists, and I doubt he would have had Malachi do so if there were strong, godly leaders available to whom he could appeal. When Haggai received a convicting message from God for Judah under good leadership, he was told to take it to Joshua and Zerubbabel. Likewise, Zechariah received messages concerning both Joshua and Zerubbabel. Malachi mentions a governor, but not by name. Instead, the Lord addresses his complaints generically: “Israel”, “O priests”, “Judah” and “O children of Jacob”. While we cannot entirely rule out a few years in which the writer of Malachi and the godly leaders of Judah were around at the same time, it seems likelier to me that Malachi received the oracle we are studying after Ezra and Nehemiah had departed the scene, between 440 and 400 BC.

Outline of Malachi

Malachi consists primarily of five complaints against the returned exiles and the bad habits that had developed among them, bookended by reminders of God’s faithfulness and his determination to make something good out of a nation that was always finding new ways to go astray. An outline might look something like this:

1. Proof of God’s ongoing love for Israel (1:1-5)
2. Five complaints:

1. Polluted offerings (1:6-14)
2. Priesthood corrupted (2:1-9)
3. Profaned covenants (2:10-16)
4. Pitiable platitudes (2:17)

— Interlude: Warning of judgment (3:1-5) —

5. Pilfering tithes (3:6-15)

3. Words of warning and encouragement (3:16 – 4:5)

Literary Form and Prophetic Emphasis

Malachi is structured as a Q&A between God and Israel, in which God puts a question in the nation’s mouth, then answers it, often with another (usually rhetorical) question. There are 27 questions in Malachi, eight of which are attributed to Israel, providing an alternate structure for the book. These are:

1. How have you loved us? (1:2)
2. How have we despised your name? (1:6)
3. How have we polluted you? (1:7)
4. Why does he not [accept our offering with favor]? (2:14)
5. How have we wearied him? (2:17)
6. How shall we return? (3:7)
7. How have we robbed you? (3:8)
8. How have we spoken against you? (3:13)

That Israel never actually asked these questions is entirely irrelevant. God knows the heart, just as the Lord Jesus knew what people were going to ask before they asked it. We can be sure these inquiries were not posed by straw men. They were as relevant as relevant could be.

Prophecy generally falls into two categories: predictive and prescriptive. Unlike Zechariah, Malachi is mostly prescriptive, concerned with course corrections needed for Jews of the early 5th century BC. The exceptions are chapter 4, which has to do with the second coming and millennial reign, and the early verses of chapter 3, which foretell the coming of John the Baptist and the Lord Jesus in both his advents. For the Christian reader, these are the most exciting verses of the book, but there is much we may learn from the mistakes made by God’s people in other times and places, and from the remedies commanded by the Lord.