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. {Ezr 4:6-23} 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, 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. The remigrations 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 neighbors: 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 Thermopylae was fought and the Persian fleet broken at Salamis. In 479 a Persian army was destroyed at Plataea, 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 Phoenicia, at Haliae, in Aegina, and in Megara in the same year."

Thus severely left to themselves and to the petty hostilities of their neighbors, 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. In exile they had suffered God’s anger, 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 neighbors. 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. 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. Like people like priest: the priesthood lost not reverence only, but decency and all conscience of their office. 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." 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.

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 "Male’ach," or "messenger, of the Lord of Hosts." 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."

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 sympathy 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 the and 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. To this the prophet adds a novel promise. God is so much the God of Love, {Mal 3:6} 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. {Mal 1:11} 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 emphasize the verse as the first note of that recognition of the real religiousness of the heathen, which we shall find swelling to such fullness 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.