At Rock Bottom
Two keys to unlock Malachi. Use either or both. One is to focus on a particular moment in your personal life; you felt at rock bottom and needed a bit of cossetting. The other is to think of a community who have lost heart, well aware that there has never been a Golden Age but wise enough to know that things certainly used to be better than now. They are not feckless, disillusioned or in despair. In spite of everything that life has thrown at them they have done their best to keep the ship afloat, but they are tired. What they sense is more the result of a drift than a leading in the wrong direction, but the last straw is that their religious leaders seem to be giving up too. They don’t want advice, rewards, lectures or sympathy, but they crave for a big hug.
‘Malachi’ is not a person’s name. It is simply Hebrew for ‘my Messenger’. Some scholars see him as ‘a cultic prophet’ — one of the last in the long line of the prophetic tradition, not a priest but possibly more sympathetic than his predecessors to the rituals of the temple, anxious to see such rituals as expressing the majesty of God and using his utterances in temple worship to that end.
The date and background are probably c 500-450 BCE, almost a century after the Babylonians had conquered Jerusalem, destroyed the temple and carried off many of the key people as forced labour into Babylon, and somewhere between the return under Cyrus, leading to the rebuilding of the temple (516 BCE), and the reforms of Ezra and Nehemiah towards the end of the 5th century.
The main object of his attack is the religious leadership (though the laity don’t escape) and it may be more helpful for us to see his main target as the religious people (ie those who keep the churches going) reserving his ‘laity’ shots for lapsed religious people (or nominal believers).
The topics raised cover ‘bad’ (or decaying) religion, exploitation of religious issues, family life (mainly mixed marriages) and inadequate religious teaching.