Malachi: My Messenger

At a Glance

Who wrote it: Unknown. Malachi means my messenger, and it may be a title taken from Malachi 3:1 rather than a name.

When: After the Temple was rebuilt, probably around 500 to 450 BC. It was the last book on the scroll of the Twelve.

Where it fits: After the exile, a generation or more after the Temple was rebuilt in 515 BC. It deals with the same troubles as Nehemiah 13: unpaid tithes, careless priests, and marriages to worshipers of other gods.

Where I quote it: I said its messenger who prepares the way was John the Baptist (Matthew 11:10; Luke 7:27; Malachi 3:1), and that John was the Elijah it promised (Matthew 11:14; 17:12–13; Malachi 4:5).

If you only read three chapters: It has four in your Bible, three in Hebrew. Read Malachi 2, 3 and 4.

Words to Know

Tithe — a tenth of the harvest, given to support the Levites and to feed the poor.

Storehouse — the Temple’s storerooms, where the tithes were kept.

Elijah — the prophet taken up in a whirlwind, expected to return before the great day.

Hireling — a hired worker, a day laborer, who depended on being paid that evening.

The Book in Brief

Malachi is a short book of prophecy, four chapters in most Bibles and three in Hebrew ones. It speaks to the people of Judah, and above all to the priests, some time after the Temple was rebuilt. It tells nothing about the prophet’s life. Even his name may be a title.

Most of the book is a series of arguments. God makes a charge, the people ask how, and God answers.

Chapter 1 begins with God’s love for Israel, then accuses the priests of offering blind, lame and sick animals. In chapter 2, God warns the priests that they have broken the covenant with Levi by teaching falsely. Then he accuses the people of marrying women who worship other gods and of betraying the wives of their youth.

In chapter 3, God promises to send a messenger to prepare the way, and then to come to his Temple, to refine the priests like silver and to judge those who oppress workers, widows and orphans. The people are told they are robbing God of the tithe. Those who fear God are written in a book of remembrance.

Chapter 4 promises a day that burns like a furnace for the arrogant, while for those who fear God the sun of righteousness will rise. The book ends by telling the people to remember the law of Moses, and by promising to send Elijah before the great day.

In the order your Bible uses, Malachi is the last page before Matthew. It ends with a promise: Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and terrible day of the LORD comes (Malachi 4:5).

Turn the page into the gospels, and the first prophet you meet is a man in the wilderness dressed like Elijah.

The messenger

Behold, I send my messenger, and he will prepare the way before me; and the Lord, whom you seek, will suddenly come to his temple (Malachi 3:1).

When John was in prison, I spoke to the crowds about him. But why did you go out? To see a prophet? Yes, I tell you, and much more than a prophet. For this is he, of whom it is written, “Behold, I send my messenger before your face, who will prepare your way before you” (Matthew 11:9–10).

And I said, If you are willing to receive it, this is Elijah, who is to come (Matthew 11:14).

Mark’s gospel opens with that same verse from Malachi, followed by Isaiah’s voice in the wilderness, and in the oldest copies calls them both the words of Isaiah the prophet (Mark 1:2–3). Later copyists changed it to the prophets.¹

Go deeperWas Malachi a name or a title?

The book’s first line reads, in your Bible, A revelation, the LORD’s word to Israel by Malachi (Malachi 1:1). In Hebrew, Malachi means my messenger, the very word God uses two chapters later: Behold, I send my messenger (Malachi 3:1). Nobody else in the scriptures has this name, and the book tells you nothing about him: no father, no town, no king’s reign.

So readers have wondered for a very long time whether Malachi was a name at all. The Greek translation of the scriptures does not treat it as one. It reads by the hand of his messenger. An old Aramaic translation, read aloud in the synagogues, goes further and says that this messenger is Ezra the scribe.²

In the Talmud the rabbis disagree. One teacher says Malachi was Mordecai, the hero of the book of Esther. Another says he was Ezra. The majority give the simplest answer: Malachi was his name.³

Modern scholars are divided in much the same way. Some think an editor took the word from Malachi 3:1 and used it as a heading for an unnamed scroll of prophecy. Others think it could be a real name, perhaps a short form of a longer name meaning messenger of the LORD.⁴

The book itself seems to love the word. It calls the priest the messenger of the LORD of Armies (Malachi 2:7), just as Haggai is called the LORD’s messenger (Haggai 1:13). Whatever the prophet’s name was, the title fits him. The book is about a messenger, and so was he.

Leftovers for God

Malachi is written as a set of arguments. God says something, the people answer back, How have we done that?, and God tells them.

The priests are offering blind, lame and sick animals on the altar. God says, Present it now to your governor! Will he be pleased with you? (Malachi 1:8). They were giving God what they would never dare give a Persian official.

And in the middle of that complaint, a startling line: For from the rising of the sun even to its going down, my name is great among the nations, and in every place incense will be offered to my name (Malachi 1:11). Some translations read it as saying that even among the nations, God is already being honored better than in his own Temple. Others, as here, read it as a promise for the future.

One father

Don’t we all have one father? Hasn’t one God created us? Why do we deal treacherously every man against his brother, profaning the covenant of our fathers? (Malachi 2:10).

Malachi says the men of Judah have dealt treacherously with the wife of your youth, divorcing them, and that God was a witness to those marriages (Malachi 2:14). Two verses later comes a line famous in many Bibles as For I hate divorce, says the LORD (Malachi 2:16). The Hebrew is very difficult, and some newer translations read it differently: One who hates and divorces … covers his garment with violence!⁵

Against the oppressors of workers

Malachi 3:5 is a list of who God will testify against:

I will come near to you to judgment; and I will be a swift witness against the sorcerers, and against the adulterers, and against the perjurers, and against those who oppress the hireling in his wages, the widow, and the fatherless, and who deprive the foreigner of justice, and don’t fear me.

Cheating workers out of their wages is on the same list as sorcery and adultery. When I told a rich man the commandments and added Do not defraud (Mark 10:19), I was standing with Malachi.

The windows of heaven

Then come the verses that are preached more than any others in this book, usually just before the offering.

Will a man rob God? Yet you rob me! But you say, “How have we robbed you?” In tithes and offerings. … Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house, and test me now in this … if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing, that there will not be room enough for (Malachi 3:8–10).

Here is what you need to know about the tithe. In the Law, every third year the tithe was stored up in each town so that the Levite, because he has no portion nor inheritance with you, as well as the foreigner living among you, the fatherless, and the widow who are within your gates shall come, and shall eat and be satisfied (Deuteronomy 14:28–29). The storehouse in Malachi was at the Temple, and it fed the Levites, who had no land of their own (Nehemiah 13:10–12). The tithe was how the landless and the poor were fed.

And remember that five verses earlier, God was testifying against people who cheat workers, oppress the widow and deprive the foreigner of justice (Malachi 3:5).

Malachi was not promising that God would make you rich if you gave money to a preacher. He was saying that a people who starved the storehouse were starving the people the tithe was meant to feed, and robbing God by doing it.

I told the Pharisees: For you tithe mint, dill, and cumin, and have left undone the weightier matters of the law: justice, mercy, and faith. But you ought to have done these, and not to have left the other undone (Matthew 23:23). Keep the tithe. But do not think the tithe is the point.

Healing in its wings

But to you who fear my name shall the sun of righteousness arise with healing in its wings (Malachi 4:2).

You may know that line from a Christmas carol: Risen with healing in his wings.⁶

The last words

The book ends:

Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and terrible day of the LORD comes. He will turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the earth with a curse (Malachi 4:5–6).

When the angel announced John’s birth to his father, he used those same words. John would go before the Lord in the spirit and power of Elijah, “to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children” (Luke 1:17).

Elijah’s job, when he came back, would not be fire from heaven. It would be to bring families back together.

My people found the last word, curse, too hard to end on. When they read Malachi aloud, they repeat the verse before it, about Elijah.⁷ At the Passover table, many still pour a cup for Elijah and open the door to see if he has come.

In your Bible, the next page is the gospel.

Go deeperWhere the Old Testament ends

Your Bible and my people’s Bible hold the same books in a different order, so they end in different places.

The Hebrew Bible has three parts: the Law, the Prophets and the Writings. Malachi closes the Prophets. After it come the Writings, the Psalms, Job, Proverbs and the rest, and the last book of all is Chronicles. It ends with the Persian king Cyrus telling the exiles that they may go home and build the Temple: let him go up (2 Chronicles 36:23). The Talmud already lists the books in that order.⁸

Christian Bibles grouped the prophets at the end, as many Greek Bibles did, and in most of them the last prophet is Malachi. So the Old Testament ends with the promise that Elijah will come before the great day. Then you turn the page, and Matthew begins.

The last lines of Malachi may have been written to close more than one book. First, Remember the law of Moses my servant (Malachi 4:4), and then the promise of Elijah. Moses for the Law, Elijah for the Prophets. Many scholars think these verses were added as an ending to the whole collection of the Prophets, or to the Law and the Prophets together.⁹

My people also remembered Malachi as the end of something. Around 180 BC, a teacher in Jerusalem named Ben Sira wrote that Elijah was ready to come again to turn the heart of the father to the son, and he praised the twelve prophets, the earliest mention of the Twelve as one collection.¹⁰ Later rabbis taught that when the last prophets, Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi, died, the holy spirit of prophecy departed from Israel.¹¹

For them, Malachi was the last of the prophets. In the gospels, the next prophet to speak is John.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Malachi 3:5, then Malachi 3:8–10, then Deuteronomy 14:28–29.

You will find: who the tithe was for, five verses after God condemns those who cheat workers.

Then read Malachi 4:5–6 and Luke 1:17.

The Short Version

• Malachi means “my messenger.” I said the messenger was John the Baptist, and that John was Elijah.
• The priests were offering God blind and lame animals, leftovers they would never give a governor.
• God testifies against those who cheat hired workers, the widow and the foreigner.
• The tithe fed the Levites, and every third year the foreigner, the fatherless and the widow. It is not a promise of riches for giving.
• The book ends with Elijah turning the hearts of the fathers to the children, and in your Bible, the next page is the gospel.