Malachi 1:11-12

On his excellent blog, Brandon Wason takes a look at a slice of the history of interpretation of Malachi 1:10-12a, 14b. He asks for feedback, which I’m happy to supply. In conjunction with an as yet unfinished review of electronic dictionaries of ancient Hebrew, I recently reviewed the Malachi passage. The relevant discussion is excerpted here and serves as the point of departure for more far-ranging reflections. 

 

Mal 1:11-12 goes like this: 

כִּ֣י מִמִּזְרַח־שֶׁ֜מֶשׁ וְעַד־מְבוֹאֹ֗ו גָּד֤וֹל שְׁמִי֙ בַּגּוֹיִ֔ם

וּבְכָל־מָק֗וֹם מֻקְטָ֥ר מֻגָּ֛שׁ לִשְׁמִ֖י וּמִנְחָ֣ה טְהוֹרָ֑ה

כִּֽי־גָד֤וֹל שְׁמִי֙ בַּגּוֹיִ֔ם אָמַ֖ר יְהוָ֥ה צְבָאֽוֹת

וְאַתֶּ֖ם מְחַלְּלִ֣ים אוֹתֹ֑ו בֶּאֱמָרְכֶ֗ם

שֻׁלְחַ֤ן אֲדֹנָי֙ מְגֹאָ֣ל ה֔וּא וְנִיב֖וֹ נִבְזֶ֥ה אָכְלֽוֹ 

 

For from the sun’s rising to its setting, my name is great among the nations,

and everywhere incense and pure oblation is offered to my name;

 
For my name is great among the nations, said Yahweh of armies,

but you profane it by your saying:

 
The Lord’s table  is pollutable;

and its bounty, its consumption, treatable with scorn.

 The use of כִּי and וְ to coordinate a preposed adjunct to a matrix of the type contrasting situation (real or imagined) + principal assertion is attested elsewhere (Isa 51:6; 54:10; cf. 49:15).[1]

The verbless clauses of the Hebrew make it clear that the passage speaks of the present (per the Old Greek translation and the united witness of ancient tradition), not the future (pace Wason and others). To be sure, the statement by Malachi is provocative. As such, it fits the context exceedingly well. For Yahweh, the worship of the Gentiles is pure in comparison to the worship of his own people. He accepts the former but not the latter.

Yahweh seeks to stir the people to jealousy. That pagan worship is described here as pure is not as impossible as it may sound. As Rashi puts it:

“My Name is great among the nations.” Our Sages stated (b. Men. 110a): For they call Him the God of the gods [דקרו ליה אלהא דאלהא]. Even one who has an idol knows that He is the God who is over all of them - and everywhere they donate in My Name.[2]

 Michael Fishbane draws out the sense of the passage in a compatible way, and places it within the larger context:

a. Malachi 1:6-9a. The prophet sounds his opening salvo against the priests who “scorn” God’s name through perversion of the sacred sacrifices. An analogy (emphasis mine, JFH) with the royal governor is offered to drive home the offense: If lame or sick offerings were given this human ruler, he would hardly accept them with favor. How much more would God be dishonored and refuse to be gracious to his people?

b. Malachi 1:9b-14. The Lord of Hosts now condemns the people as well for their ritual impieties. In all the world, the Name of God is honored. Only among His people is it defiled, through lame and sick offerings. The analogy (emphasis mine, JFH) sharpens the sin and evokes a divine curse.[3]

 The construal of sacrifice to foreign gods as worship of one’s own God may well have been an acceptable cross-cultural hermeneutical operation among the religions of the ancient Near East – including the religion of Israel. Mark S. Smith is preparing a study on this and related matters in conjunction with the larger issue of the transferability of divine attributes from one divinity to another across theologies of the ancient Near East. In Isa 40-55 the expropriation of pagan religion in Yahwistic terms goes hand in hand with a polemic against the idolatry of it all (i.e., the construction, care, and feeding of divine images). It is probable that Second Isaiah knew full well that Cyrus understood himself to be called by “the lord of the gods” to overrunBabylon and rule in place of its king:

 
. . . the lord of the gods became furiously angry [and he left] their borders; and the gods who lived among them forsook their dwellings, angry that he had brought (them) into Babylon. Marduk [   ] turned (?) towards all the habitations that were abandoned and all the people of Sumer and Akkad who had become corpses; [he was recon]ciled and had mercy (upon them). He surveyed and looked throughout all the lands, searching for a righteous king whom he would support. He called out his name: Cyrus, king of Anshan; he pronounced his name to be king over all.[4]

But the prophet construes the call in Yahwistic terms and rails against idolatry at the same time (Isa 41:25-41:8; cf. 41:1-7; 44:28-45:4; 46:11). Yahweh is said to say, “I, Yahweh, summoned you in righteousness; I grasped you by the hand; I formed you and appointed you a savior of people, a light of nations” (42:6), Cyrus, that is, whom he “roused from the north, and he came; from the appearing place of the sun, one who invokes My name” (41:25). In my view, the transferability of Cyrus’s invocation of Ahura Mazda to Marduk on the one hand and Yahweh on the other was a non-issue because of the identical roles the respective gods played in their respective cults. If so, a theological context for Mal 1:10-12, 14 is established.

 The history of interpretation of Mal 1:10-12, 14 is interesting in its own right. Dueling Jewish and Christian interpretations are reported in Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho (2d cent. ce). Wason ably summarizes the positions of both:

In Dial. 28, Justin addresses the topic of circumcision. He concludes from three Old Testament writings that God no longer accepts the Jewish sacrifices (as they are uncircumcised in heart), but now gladly looks upon the sacrifices of the Gentiles throughout the world. He draws on the circumcision-of-the-heart language in Jeremiah 4:3-4 and 9:25-26. Anyone, Justin argues, possessing knowledge of God and his Christ, while keeping everlasting decrees (αἰώνια δίκαια) has the “good and useful” circumcision, and is God’s friend and God rejoices in his gifts (τοῖς δώροις) and sacrifices (ταῖς προσφοραῖς). Then comes the Malachi quotation:

 

I have no pleasure in you, says the Lord; and I will not accept your sacrifices from your hands. For from the rising of the sun unto its setting my name has been glorified among the nations, and in every place a sacrifice is offered unto my name, even a pure sacrifice, for my name is honored among the nations, says the Lord, but you desecrate it. (1:10-12)

 

Immediately following is a quotation from Psalm 18:43, “A people, whom I have not known, served me, and upon the hearing with the ear, they obeyed me.”

Justin [in another place, Dial. 141] acknowledges Trypho’s counter argument that the Malachi prophecy does not refer to Christians, but those in Jerusalem during Malachi’s day, and that the sacrifices on which God looked satisfactorily were the prayers of the Diaspora Jews.

 Neither Trypho’s nor Justin’s interpretation, it turns out, hews to the historical sense of the text. Per se the text is not complimentary to its addressees in any way, not even to the Jews of the Diaspora as opposed to those of Jerusalem. The honor that Yahweh receives in all the world is of no interest per se, except as a foil to the dishonor Yahweh currently receives from his own people.

Justin and Trypho’s interpretive strategies, in point of fact, are mirror images of each other. Each turns the text to temporary advantage by deflecting its critical force onto some entity other than the community to which he belongs. Conversely, that which is praised in the text is assumed to apply to one’s community.

Justin and Trypho both protect and project the self-understanding of their respective communities by means of the scripture they hold in common. It can hardly be otherwise for interpreters who turn to scripture, as both Jews and Christians do, in the expectation that God will speak to them through it. In the words of Moses, “It is not with our fathers that God sealed this covenant, but with us, the living, we who are here today” (Deut 5:3). For both Justin and Trypho, God speaks, even now, in and through textually mediated past events.

But both go about protecting and projecting the metanarrative of their respective communities in a way that is out of synch with the book of Malachi as a whole and with the dynamic principle of biblical prophecy in general. In the book of Malachi, the objects of God’s ferocious criticism and the heirs of his promises are one and the same. The book regards the election of Jacob by God to be irrevocable: “I, Yahweh, I have not changed, and you, the children of Jacob, you have not ceased to be” (3:6). With a view to salvation, God announces that the coming of “the angel of the covenant” is nigh. He will act like “a smelter’s fire and a fuller’s lye” (3:1-3). Those who refuse to turn back to God will be judged, but those who do turn back will be saved. God promises to ensure that both Levites and people will come full circle, and do what they were enjoined to do in the beginning, “and then the offerings of Judah and Jerusalem shall be pleasing to the Lord as in the days of yore” (3:3-4, 7).

Despite the faithful antics of Justin and Trypho, the sense of the book of Malachi is crystal clear. The heirs of its glorious promises are the ones who know themselves to be the objects of its relentless criticism. Justin and Trypho would have protected and projected the metanarratives of their communities with greater integrity if they had emphasized that truth. It was not to be.

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[1] כִּי and וְ are translatable as ‘for’ and ‘but’ respectively, in Isa 51:6; 54:10 (cf. 49:15) as Driver proposes, and in Mal 1:11-12 (cf. OG), but a translation ‘though’ and ‘[zero]’ is no less possible, and more idiomatic in contemporary English. I preserve the antiquated “for . . . but’ language in order to emphasize that my construal of the text is not innovative with respect to tradition. For further discussion, see S. R. Driver, A Treatise on the Use of the Tenses in Hebrew and Some Other Syntactical Questions (introd. W. Randall Garr; The Biblical Resource Series; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998 [1874]) 183, n. 1.

[2] I reproduce the translation of Rashi by A. J. Rosenberg, online here.

[3] Michael Fishbane, The Haftarot (JPSBC; Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2002) 575.

[4]Cyrus Cylinder, lines 9ff. Translation by Mordechai Cogan in Context of Scripture Volume 2 (ed. William W. Hallo and K. Lawson Younger; Leiden: Brill, 2000) 315.

Comments

[Brandon Wason]

Thank you, John, for this very helpful post! The Hebrew exegesis was the weakest part of my study, but you have opened it up nicely.

[John]

Justin Martyrs, Ignatius and the Didache all suggest that the prophecy spoke of in Malachi 1 is fulfilled in the Eucharist which has become the pure sacrifice which is acceptable to God. Are you saying they were wrong in their interpretations?

[JohnFH]

No, I am not saying that the Fathers erred in thinking that God in Christ continued to fufill the prophecies of old. Christians have always looked around at what God is doing in their midst, read the scriptures in that light, and said, "this [what we see] is that [what scripture proclaims]." See Acts 2; 1 Peter 1:10-12.

But if the message of salvation of Malachi (also) relates to the church, so does the message of judgment of Malachi. It will not do to divvy up the contents of the book and assign the good to us and the bad to our opponents.

To the extent that the Fathers operated in this way, they forfeited the blessings that accrue to those who understand themselves to be, in Luther's justly famous phrase, simul iustus et peccator.