_Remember the Torah of Moses, My servant, with which I charged him in Horeb for all Israel: statutes and judgments. Lo! I am sending to you Elijah the prophet, before the coming of the great and terrible day of Jehovah. And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the sons, and the heart of the sons to their fathers, ere I come and strike the land with the Ban._
* * * * *
“Malachi” makes this promise of the Law in the dialect of Deuteronomy: _statutes and judgments with which Jehovah charged Moses for Israel_. But the Law he enforces is not that which God delivered to Moses on the plains of Shittim, but that which He gave him in Mount Horeb. And so it came to pass. In a very few years after “Malachi” prophesied Ezra the Scribe brought from Babylon the great Levitical Code, which appears to have been arranged there, while the colony in Jerusalem were still organising their life under the Deuteronomic legislation. In 444 B.C. this Levitical Code, along with Deuteronomy, became by covenant between the people and their God their Canon and Law. And in the next of our prophets, Joel, we shall find its full influence at work.
[1002] See above, p. 343.
[1003] See above, Chapter XIV. on “Edom and Israel.”
[1004] Heb. xii. 16.
[1005] Romans ix. 13. The citation is from the LXX.: τὸν Ἰακὼβ ἠγάπησα, τὸν δὲ Ἠσαῦ ἐμίσησα.
[1006] This was mainly _after_ the beginning of exile. Shortly before that Deut. xxiii. 7 says: _Thou shalt not abhor an Edomite, for he is thy brother_.
[1007] So even so recently as 1888, Stade, _Gesch. des Volkes Israel_, II., p. 112.
[1008] See above, p. 169. This interpretation is there said to be Wellhausen’s; but Cheyne, in a note contributed to the _Z.A.T.W._, 1894, p. 142, points out that Grätz, in an article “Die Anfänge der Nabatäer-Herrschaft” in the _Monatschrift für Wissenschaft u. Geschichte des Judenthums_, 1875, pp. 60-66, had already explained “Mal.” i. 1-5 as describing the conquest of Edom by the Nabateans. This is adopted by Buhl in his _Gesch. der Edomiter_, p. 79.
[1009] The verb in the feminine indicates that the population of Edom is meant.
[1010] i. 6.
[1011] Psalm ciii. 9. In Psalm lxxiii. 15 believers are called _His children_; but elsewhere sonship is claimed only for the king—ii. 7, lxxxix. 27 f.
[1012] Hosea xi. 1 ff. (though even here the idea of discipline is present) and Isa. lxiii. 16.
[1013] iii. 4.
[1014] Isa. lxiv. 8, cf. Deut. xxxii. 11 where the discipline of Israel by Jehovah, shaking them out of their desert circumstance and tempting them to their great career in Palestine, is likened to the father-eagle’s training of his new-fledged brood to fly: A.V. mother-eagle.
[1015] Cf. Cheyne, _Origin of the Psalter_, p. 305, n. O.
[1016] Vol. I., Chap. IX.
[1017] Or used polluted things with respect to Thee. For similar construction see Zech. vii. 5: צמתוני. This in answer to Wellhausen, who, on the ground that the phrase gives גאל a wrong object and destroys the connection, deletes it. Further he takes מגאל, not in the sense of pollution, but as equivalent to נבזה, _despised_.
[1018] Obviously _in their hearts = thinking_.
[1019] LXX. _is there no harm?_
[1020] _Pacify the face of_, as in Zechariah.
[1021] So LXX. Heb. _is great_, but the phrase is probably written by mistake from the instance further on: _is glorified_ could scarcely have been used in the very literal version of the LXX. unless it had been found in the original.
[1022] מקום, here to be taken in the sense it bears in Arabic of _sacred place_. See on Zeph. ii. 11: above, p. 64, n. 159.
[1023] Wellhausen deletes מגש as a gloss on מקטר, and the vau before מנחה.
[1024] Heb. _say_.