Mining the Minors: Malachi (5)

The bulk of Malachi’s prophecy consists of the prophet quoting God directly, passing on corrective messages from YHWH to his nation and its priests. Verses 10-17 of chapter 2 are the first time the prophet has had anything to say for himself, slipping into the first person plural (“we”, “us”). Also, until this point Malachi has exclusively targeted the priests. Now he rebukes the men of his entire nation.

His primary concern remains the profaning of covenants.

2/ Five Complaints (continued)

Malachi 2:10-16 — Profaned Covenants

“Have we not all one Father? Has not one God created us? Why then are we faithless to one another, profaning the covenant of our fathers? Judah has been faithless, and abomination has been committed in Israel and in Jerusalem. For Judah has profaned the sanctuary of the Lord, which he loves, and has married the daughter of a foreign god. May the Lord cut off from the tents of Jacob any descendant of the man who does this, who brings an offering to the Lord of hosts!

And this second thing you do. You cover the Lord’s altar with tears, with weeping and groaning because he no longer regards the offering or accepts it with favor from your hand. But you say, ‘Why does he not?’ Because the Lord was witness between you and the wife of your youth, to whom you have been faithless, though she is your companion and your wife by covenant. Did he not make them one, with a portion of the Spirit in their union? And what was the one God seeking? Godly offspring. So guard yourselves in your spirit, and let none of you be faithless to the wife of your youth. ‘For the man who does not love his wife but divorces her,’ says the Lord, the God of Israel, ‘covers his garment with violence,’ says the Lord of hosts. ‘So guard yourselves in your spirit, and do not be faithless.’ ”

Verses 10-16 target two related problems. The first is that the men of Judah were marrying foreign women. The second was that they were divorcing their Israelite wives to do it.

The Husband of One Wife

The latter trend raises a question: Why not just accumulate multiple wives, as did Jacob, the father of the nation, or the more impressive early kings of Israel, or even Hannah’s husband? Polygamy had a precedent in Israel, even a royal and patriarchal precedent. In some instances (“when brothers dwell together”), it was even seen as dishonorable not to take on the responsibility of a widowed family member with no children, though in practice this was optional and did not impact most marriages.

The most obvious answer is that under the law, each wife came with certain regular entitlements (food, clothing and “marital rights” not to be diminished when another wife was taken) that made multiple spouses a project most men could not or would not manage. Jacob, David and Solomon were exceedingly wealthy. The average Jewish man could not afford to play in their league. In the end, even a stiff one-time penalty to divorce a Jewish wife was probably a better deal than the expenses associated with a polygamous household.

Another possibility is that bringing a foreign wife into an existing domestic situation would create jealousies and ongoing friction that most men would not care to deal with. The Old Testament record shows polygamous households were consistently unhappier than monogamous marriages. Perhaps some Israelite men had noticed.

The likeliest answer is that polygamy, though tolerated in Israel, was never promoted or perceived as a universal good, and gradually went out of fashion once Moses affirmed divorce was a legal possibility. Men who were not “the husband of one wife” were exceptions, not the norm.

The Daughter of a Foreign God

Malachi calls marriage to foreign women “an abomination” and “faithlessness”, and calls the attempt to carry on with one’s religious practices while engaged in foreign marriage “profaning the sanctuary”. The second half of this complaint spells out the reason. The Lord was seeking godly offspring in Israel: children raised by a devout team of Israelite husband and wife, taught the meaning behind the symbolic language of the law and the love of God with heart, soul and mind, which is the great commandment. The effect of foreign marriages, as the book of Nehemiah vividly spells out, was to produce offspring who “could not speak the language of Judah” and did not know YHWH. Foreign wives were an Israelite epidemic during this period. The book of Ezra lists nine different foreign nations with which Judean men were intermarrying.

Foreign wives were not just a domestic issue, but also a flagrant offense against Israel’s God. Half-breed children had no attachment to the Law of Moses. Raised by their pagan mothers, they worshiped the gods of their nations. The situation was unsustainable if allowed to become commonplace, and it explains why the governor uncharacteristically resorted to violence when confronted with men who had married foreign wives. Malachi calls down a curse on the man who fathered a half-breed child that his name be cut off from Israel. He would be leaving a piece of God’s inheritance in the hands of foreigners who cared nothing for it.

Faithlessness to the Wife of One’s Youth

Malachi makes explicit what Ezra and Nehemiah do not, though of course we could read it between the lines in either of the historical books. In order to marry foreign women, the returned Jewish exiles were also divorcing their Jewish wives, presumably relying on the divorce provisions of the Law of Moses to do it with some level of social legitimacy and the absence of stigma and shame.

YHWH rejected the offerings of these men, refusing to accept them with favor. Somehow, these men were getting the message that their offerings were no longer accomplishing the purpose for which they intended them. Perhaps they were looking for blessings and prosperity and were not seeing any evidence of God’s favor in their lives, so they wept and groaned at their fate. Their problem was that the Lord had taken the side of the rejected wife. A similar theme comes up in the New Testament, where Peter tells Christian husbands to honor their wives “so that your prayers may not be hindered”. Covenant breaking is a serious matter.

The remedy, as Malachi says twice, is “guard yourselves in your spirit, and do not be faithless”. In other words, do not put yourself in any situation where you may be tempted to break your marriage vows. This remains sound advice notwithstanding the passage of centuries. Doug Wilson recently counseled a young man struggling with extramarital temptation from a co-worker to quit his job rather than risk his marriage. If Doug’s advice sounds extreme, consider the Lord’s own words, “If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away.” If anything, Doug’s solution is a little bit on the lenient side.

The Little Children

What do you imagine happened to the children of those original Jewish marriages? Why, probably exactly the same sort of thing that happens today. A new wife generally has little interest in raising someone else’s children or in raising her own alongside them. Sarah didn’t want to see Ishmael inherit with Isaac, so Abraham’s firstborn son was out of luck and permanently excused from the family homestead. How much more viciously would pagan women defend their own children at the expense of the children of Judah? The Jewish children, for the most part, were almost surely sent packing with their mothers.

Is it any surprise that two of three gospel accounts put the words “Let the little children come to me” side by side with the Lord’s teaching on divorce? The two issues were intimately related.

Two Covenants

Two profaned covenants are referenced in these verses:

The first (“the covenant of our fathers”, v10) relates to marrying foreign wives. As when Israel whored with the daughters of Moab in Numbers 25, the inevitable consequence of unions with foreign women was breaking the covenant at Sinai, which begins with the words, “You shall have no other gods before me.” There is no way to break the OT link between adultery and idolatry. That connection is implicit here, and Nehemiah said as much when he rebuked the men who had married foreign wives with the question “Did not Solomon king of Israel sin on account of such women?” It was for this sin that God divided the nation less than a century after David united it. It was no small matter.

The second (“your wife by covenant”, v14), is probably an indication that even in those days, marriage was sealed with an oath, either explicitly and verbally by the husband and perhaps the wife, or implicitly in the mystery of the one flesh union. Malachi makes oblique reference to the original marriage between Adam and Eve with the words “Did he not make them one, with a portion of the Spirit in their union?” Christ interpreted the words “They shall become one flesh” in the Genesis account to mean that the marriage union is not merely an agreement between a man and a woman (more often in those days between a man and a woman’s father) but between man and God. He says, “What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.” Marriage is not just a social issue but also a spiritual issue.

Again, not a small matter, and the consequences of violating these covenants repeatedly were acutely realized by the nation in AD70.