_FROM ZECHARIAH TO “MALACHI”_
Between the completion of the Temple in 516 and the arrival of Ezra in
458, we have almost no record of the little colony round Mount Zion.
The Jewish chronicles devote to the period but a few verses of
unsupported tradition.[987] After 517 we have nothing from Zechariah
himself; and if any other prophet appeared during the next
half-century, his words have not survived. We are left to infer what
was the true condition of affairs, not less from this ominous silence
than from the hints which are given to us in the writings of “Malachi,”
Ezra and Nehemiah after the period was over. Beyond a partial attempt
to rebuild the walls of the city in the reign of Artaxerxes I.,[988]
there seems to have been nothing to record. It was a period of
disillusion, disheartening and decay. The completion of the Temple did
not bring in the Messianic era. Zerubbabel, whom Haggai and Zechariah
had crowned as the promised King of Israel, died without reaching
higher rank than a minor satrapy in the Persian Empire, and even in
that he appears to have been succeeded by a Persian official.[989] The
re-migrations from Babylon and elsewhere, which Zechariah predicted,
did not take place. The small population of Jerusalem were still
harassed by the hostility, and their morale sapped by the
insidiousness, of their Samaritan neighbours: they were denied the
stimulus, the purgation, the glory of a great persecution. Their
Persian tyrants for the most part left them alone. The world left them
alone. Nothing stirred in Palestine except the Samaritan intrigues.
History rolled away westward, and destiny seemed to be settling on the
Greeks. In 490 Miltiades defeated the Persians at Marathon. In 480
Thermopylæ was fought and the Persian fleet broken at Salamis. In 479 a
Persian army was destroyed at Platæa, and Xerxes lost Europe and most
of the Ionian coast. In 460 Athens sent an expedition to Egypt to
assist the Egyptian revolt against Persia, and in 457 “her slain fell
in Cyprus, in Egypt, in Phœnicia, at Haliæ, in Ægina, and in Megara in
the same year.”
Thus severely left to themselves and to the petty hostilities of their
neighbours, the Jews appear to have sunk into a careless and sordid
manner of life. They entered the period, it is true, with some sense of
their distinction.[990] In exile they had suffered God’s anger,[991]
and had been purged by it. But out of discipline often springs pride,
and there is no subtler temptation of the human heart. The returned
Israel felt this to the quick, and it sorely unfitted them for
encountering the disappointment and hardship which followed upon the
completion of the Temple. The tide of hope, which rose to flood with
that consummation, ebbed rapidly away, and left God’s people
struggling, like any ordinary tribe of peasants, with bad seasons and
the cruelty of their envious neighbours. Their pride was set on edge,
and they fell, not as at other periods of disappointment into despair,
but into a bitter carelessness and a contempt of their duty to God.
This was a curious temper, and, so far as we know, new in Israel. It
led them to despise both His love and His holiness.[992] They neglected
their Temple dues, and impudently presented to their God polluted bread
and blemished beasts which they would not have dared to offer to their
Persian governor.[993] Like people like priest: the priesthood lost not
reverence only, but decency and all conscience of their office.[994]
They _despised the Table of the Lord_, ceased to instruct the people
and grew partial in judgment. As a consequence they became contemptible
in the eyes of the community. Immorality prevailed among all classes:
_every man dealt treacherously with his brother_.[995] Adultery,
perjury, fraud and the oppression of the poor were very rife.
One particular fashion, in which the people’s wounded pride spited
itself, was the custom of marriage which even the best families
contracted with the half-heathen _people of the land_. Across Judah
there were scattered the descendants of those Jews whom Nebuchadrezzar
had not deemed worth removing to Babylon. Whether regarded from a
social or a religious point of view, their fathers had been the dregs
of the old community. Their own religion, cut off as they were from the
main body of Israel and scattered among the old heathen shrines of the
land, must have deteriorated still further; but in all probability they
had secured for themselves the best portions of the vacant soil, and
now enjoyed a comfort and a stability of welfare far beyond that which
was yet attainable by the majority of the returned exiles. More
numerous than these dregs of ancient Jewry were the very mixed race of
the Samaritans. They possessed a rich land, which they had cultivated
long enough for many of their families to be settled in comparative
wealth. With all these half-pagan Jews and Samaritans, the families of
the true Israel, as they regarded themselves, did not hesitate to form
alliances, for in the precarious position of the colony, such alliances
were the surest way both to wealth and to political influence. How much
the Jews were mastered by their desire for them is seen from the fact
that, when the relatives of their half-heathen brides made it a
condition of the marriages that they should first put away their old
wives, they readily did so. Divorce became very frequent, and great
suffering was inflicted on the native Jewish women.[996]
So the religious condition of Israel declined for nearly two
generations, and then about 460 the Word of God, after long silence,
broke once more through a prophet’s lips.
We call this prophet “Malachi,” following the error of an editor of
his book, who, finding it nameless, inferred or invented that name
from its description of the priest as the “Malĕ’ach,” or _messenger,
of the Lord of Hosts_.[997] But the prophet gave himself no name.
Writing from the midst of a poor and persecuted group of the people,
and attacking the authorities both of church and state, he preferred to
publish his charge anonymously. His name was in _the Lord’s own book of
remembrance_.[998]
The unknown prophet addressed himself both to the sinners of his
people, and to those querulous adherents of Jehovah whom the success of
the sinners had tempted to despair in their service of God. His style
shares the practical directness of his predecessors among the returned
exiles. He takes up one point after another, and drives them home in a
series of strong, plain paragraphs of prose. But it is sixty years
since Haggai and Zechariah, and in the circumstances we have described,
a prophet could no longer come forward as a public inspirer of his
nation. Prophecy seems to have been driven from public life, from the
sudden enforcement of truth in the face of the people to the more
deliberate and ordered argument which marks the teacher who works in
private. In the Book of “Malachi” there are many of the principles and
much of the enthusiasm of the ancient Hebrew seer. But the discourse is
broken up into formal paragraphs, each upon the same academic model.
First a truth is pronounced, or a charge made against the people; then
with the words _but ye will say_ the prophet states some possible
objection of his hearers, proceeds to answer it by detailed evidence,
and only then drives home his truth, or his charge, in genuine
prophetic fashion. To the student of prophecy this peculiarity of the
book is of the greatest interest, for it is no merely personal
idiosyncrasy. We rather feel that prophecy is now assuming the temper
of the teacher. The method is the commencement of that which later on
becomes the prevailing habit in Jewish literature. Just as with
Zephaniah we saw prophecy passing into Apocalypse, and with Habakkuk
into the speculation of the schools of Wisdom, so now in “Malachi” we
perceive its transformation into the scholasticism of the Rabbis.
But the interest of this change of style must not prevent us from
appreciating the genuine prophetic spirit of our book. Far more fully
than, for instance, that of Haggai, to the style of which its practical
simplicity is so akin, it enumerates the prophetic principles: the
everlasting Love of Jehovah for Israel, the Fatherhood of Jehovah and
His Holiness, His ancient Ideals for Priesthood and People, the need of
a Repentance proved by deeds, the consequent Promise of Prosperity, the
Day of the Lord, and Judgment between the evil and the righteous. Upon
the last of these the book affords a striking proof of the delinquency
of the people during the last half-century, and in connection with it
the prophet introduces certain novel features. To Haggai and Zechariah
the great Tribulation had closed with the Exile and the rebuilding
of the Temple: Israel stood on the margin of the Messianic age. But
the Book of “Malachi” proclaims the need of another judgment as
emphatically as the older prophets had predicted the Babylonian doom.
“Malachi” repeats their name for it, _the great and terrible Day of
Jehovah_. But he does not foresee it, as they did, in the shape of
a historical process. His description of it is pure Apocalypse—_the
fire of the smelter and the fuller’s acid: the day that burns like
a furnace_, when all wickedness is as stubble, and all evil men are
devoured, but to the righteous _the Sun of Righteousness shall arise
with healing in His wings_, and they shall tread the wicked under
foot.[999] To this the prophet adds a novel promise. God is so much the
God of love,[1000] that before the Day comes He will give His people
an opportunity of conversion. He will send them Elijah the prophet to
change their hearts, that He may be prevented from striking the land
with His Ban.
In one other point the book is original, and that is in its attitude
towards the heathen. Among the heathen, it boldly says, Jehovah is
held in higher reverence than among His own people.[1001] In such a
statement we can hardly fail to feel the influence upon Israel of their
contact, often close and personal, with their wise and mild tyrants
the Persians. We may emphasise the verse as the first note of that
recognition of the real religiousness of the heathen, which we shall
find swelling to such fulness and tenderness in the Book of Jonah.
Such are in brief the style and the principles of the Book of
“Malachi,” whose separate prophecies we may now proceed to take up in
detail.
FOOTNOTES:
[987] Ezra iv. 6-23.
[988] This is recorded in the Aramean document which has been
incorporated in our Book of Ezra, and there is no reason to doubt its
reality. In that document we have already found, in spite of its
comparatively late date, much that is accurate history. See above, p.
212. And it is clear that, the Temple being finished, the Jews must
have drawn upon themselves the same religious envy of the Samaritans
which had previously delayed the construction of the Temple. To meet
it, what more natural than that the Jews should have attempted to raise
the walls of their city? It is almost impossible to believe that they
who had achieved the construction of the Temple in 516 should not, in
the next fifty years, make some effort to raise their fallen walls. And
indeed Nehemiah’s account of his own work almost necessarily implies
that they had done so, for what he did after 445 was not to build new
walls, but rather to repair shattered ones.
[989] See above, p. 335, n. 970, and below, p. 354, on “Mal.” i. 8.
[990] Cf. Stade, _Gesch. des Volkes Israel_, II., pp. 128-138, the best
account of this period.
[991] “Mal.” iii. 14.
[992] “Mal.” i. 2, 6; iii. 8 f.
[993] _Id._ i. 7 f., 12-14.
[994] _Id._ i. 6 f., ii.
[995] _Id._ ii, 10.
[996] “Mal.” ii. 10-16.
[997] For proof of this see above, pp. 331 f.
[998] “Mal.” iii. 16.
[999] iii. 2, 19 ff. Heb., iv. 1 ff. Eng.
[1000] iii. 6.
[1001] i. 11.