Summary: Bible - Book of Malachi

The GIST

Malachi is the last of the twelve Minor Prophets, the book that closes the prophetic collection of the Hebrew Bible and, in most Christian Bibles, the last page of the Old Testament. Jewish tradition calls it the seal of the prophets. It is short, three chapters in Hebrew and four in most English versions, and it has a voice all its own. The book is an argument. God makes a statement, the people answer back with a skeptical question, and God replies. "I have loved you, saith the LORD. Yet ye say, Wherein hast thou loved us?" That pattern, repeated six times, makes up nearly the entire book.

The setting is Jerusalem some time after the return from exile. The Temple has been rebuilt, which puts the book after 515 BCE, and the province is run by a governor, not a king. Most scholars place it close to the days of Ezra and Nehemiah, around the middle of the fifth century BCE. The great hopes of the return have not come true. Worship has resumed, but life is hard and ordinary, and a tired cynicism has settled in. One writer suggests the people were disillusioned because the restoration had brought nothing like the splendor the earlier prophets had led them to expect. Malachi was written to confront what its author saw as lax religion and social wrong, among the priests above all. Who that author was is uncertain. The word Malachi simply means my messenger, and it may be a title, not a name; an old Jewish tradition identifies the writer with Ezra.

What It Says

First dispute: does God love us? (1:1 to 5). The book opens with a declaration of love and an immediate challenge to it. The people want proof. God's answer reaches back to the brothers Jacob and Esau. He chose Jacob, the ancestor of Israel, and the proof is in front of them: Edom, Esau's nation, lies in ruins and will not recover, while Israel has been brought home. Their own eyes will see it, and they will say, "The LORD will be magnified from the border of Israel."

Second dispute: contempt at the altar (1:6 to 2:9). The longest section is aimed at the priests. "A son honoureth his father, and a servant his master: if then I be a father, where is mine honour?" The priests ask how they have despised God's name, and the answer is specific. They are putting blind, lame and sick animals on the altar, the leftovers of the flock. Malachi's retort is withering: "offer it now unto thy governor; will he be pleased with thee?" They would not dare serve such things to a Persian official. They find the whole business tedious. "Behold, what a weariness is it!" they say. God would prefer that someone shut the Temple doors altogether than that such worship go on. Against the meanness of Jerusalem's offerings the prophet sets an astonishing horizon: "from the rising of the sun even unto the going down of the same my name shall be great among the Gentiles."

The charge then becomes a warning. The priests have a calling, described through the figure of their ancestor Levi, who walked with God "in peace and equity" and turned many from wrongdoing. "For the priest's lips should keep knowledge," because he is a messenger of the LORD of hosts. Instead these priests have caused many to stumble by their teaching and have shown partiality in applying the law. If they do not take it to heart, their blessings will become curses.

Third dispute: broken faith at home (2:10 to 16). The prophet turns to the whole community with a question that still reads as a foundation for ethics: "Have we not all one father? hath not one God created us? why do we deal treacherously every man against his brother?" Two forms of treachery are named. Judah "hath married the daughter of a strange god." And men are abandoning the wives they married when young, then weeping at the altar and wondering why their offerings are not accepted. The answer is that God was a witness to those marriages. A wife is "thy companion, and the wife of thy covenant," and God hates the putting away of a wife. Interpreters differ over exactly which practice is in view, and the passage may also work as an image of Israel's faithlessness toward God. It is worth noticing that where the book of Ezra called for foreign wives to be sent away, Malachi's emphasis falls on staying faithful. Either way the demand is plain: "let none deal treacherously against the wife of his youth."

Fourth dispute: where is the God of justice? (2:17 to 3:5). The people have worn God out with their talk. They say that evildoers seem to be the ones he favors, and ask, "Where is the God of judgment?" The reply is that he is coming, and sooner than they would like. "Behold, I will send my messenger, and he shall prepare the way before me: and the LORD, whom ye seek, shall suddenly come to his temple." But the arrival they have been demanding will not be comfortable. "But who may abide the day of his coming? and who shall stand when he appeareth? for he is like a refiner's fire, and like fullers' soap." He will purify the priesthood as silver is purified, and he will be a swift witness against sorcerers, adulterers and perjurers, and against those who cheat workers of their wages and oppress the widow, the orphan and the foreigner.

Fifth dispute: robbing God (3:6 to 12). God has not changed, and that is the only reason the nation still exists. "Return unto me, and I will return unto you." The people ask how. The answer is unexpected: "Will a man rob God? Yet ye have robbed me." They have withheld the tithes and offerings that supported the Temple. The challenge that follows is among the best known in the book. "Bring ye all the tithes into the storehouse," God says, "and prove me now herewith," and see whether he will not "open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it."

Sixth dispute: is it worth serving God? (3:13 to 4:3). The last complaint is the bleakest. "It is vain to serve God," the people have been saying. The arrogant are the happy ones, and those who test God get away with it. This time the answer comes first through a quiet scene. Those who feared the LORD talked with one another, "and the LORD hearkened, and heard it, and a book of remembrance was written before him." They are his treasure, and he will spare them as a man spares his own son. A day is coming that will burn like an oven and leave the arrogant neither root nor branch. "But unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings," and they will go out leaping like calves released from the stall.

Two closing commands (4:4 to 6). The book, and with it the prophets, ends by looking in two directions. Backward: "Remember ye the law of Moses my servant." Forward: "Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the LORD," to turn the hearts of fathers to their children and of children to their fathers.

Why It Matters

Malachi speaks to a condition that rarely gets a prophet of its own: not crisis but drift. The people he addresses are not idolaters in open revolt. They are going through the motions, offering God their second best and privately wondering whether any of it makes a difference. The book takes that mood seriously enough to argue with it point by point, and its answer joins things that are often kept apart. Honest worship, fidelity in marriage, fair wages, care for the vulnerable and generosity all belong to one loyalty.

Its place in the canon gives its ending unusual weight. In Judaism, the promise of Elijah's return shaped the expectation of the one who will prepare the way for the Messiah, an expectation that continues. In Christianity, the book is often quoted in the New Testament for its messianic themes, and because Malachi stands last in the Christian Old Testament, its promise of a messenger leads directly into the Gospels. The passage on tithes remains central to Christian discussions of giving. Readers also remember its single most consoling line, addressed to a people who had every reason to expect the worst: "For I am the LORD, I change not; therefore ye sons of Jacob are not consumed." Some have suggested that the whole is laid out like a trial, or like a covenant document, with God as the wronged party stating his case. Scholars generally see the book as six disputes that took shape in the Persian period, with some later editing, and fragments of it are among the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Who Should Read It

Read Malachi if your faith, or your community's, has gone flat and you want to be argued out of it. It is quick, pointed and surprisingly modern in its back-and-forth. It suits anyone interested in how the Old Testament ends, in what the prophets expected of religious leaders, or in the link between worship and everyday integrity.