IT is debated whether Malachi is a personal name, or merely official ("my messenger"), or used symbolically. . . . The prophet takes in at a glance, past, present, and future. Starting with the past, he sets plainly before his hearers the love which led Yahweh to choose Jacob while he rejected Esau. In contrast to this love of long standing, the prophet sets the present conduct of the people. People and priest sin in that they bring diseased offerings, reduce the temple revenues, and disgrace the divine name by mixed marriages. For these things comes the judgment, which is to be ushered in by a great messenger, whom Yahweh calls emphatically "my messenger," but who, in turn, is only the forerunner of a still greater, the angel of the covenant, with whom Yahweh himself will appear, and this messenger, as the counterpart of Moses, will reveal the new law to God's people. The prophet determines yet more closely the time of the coming of the forerunner, when he says that he is the prophet Elijah, who will come to convert young and old. Then the Lord will return to His temple, and the great and terrible day of judgment will begin. But the judgment has two sides, the destruction of the ungodly, and the refining and purification of the righteous. While Malachi's minatory sermon seems to lay stress upon mere externals, upon the outward observance of the law, in reality he cites the cases of disobedience merely as examples in order to exhort the people to such conduct as befits those in the presence of the day of final reckoning. Israel's duty —this is his exhortation—is in general and in particular conscientiously to obey the law. Malachi has . . . been charged with laying undue emphasis upon sacrifice and thus with being in sharp contrast with the earlier prophets. But alongside of these passages should be placed Malachi i. 10, which shows that not sacrifice in itself but as an evidence of righteous intention is what the prophet has in mind.
—From The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia.
