Welcome to Bible Fiber where we are encountering the textures and shades of the prophetic tapestry in a year-long study of the twelve minor prophets. I am Shelley Neese, president of The Jerusalem Connection, a Christian organization devoted to sharing the story of the people of Israel, both ancient and modern.
This week we are reading Malachi’s third disputation which covers Malachi 2:10-16. The disputation is short and to the point. Israelite men are divorcing their Israelite wives to marry pagan women and God is not pleased!
While the second disputation targeted the priesthood, the third disputation addresses the whole community. Malachi’s disputations often begin with a question where the answer is a presumed “yes.” Malachi asks, “Have we not all one father? Has not one God created us?” (2:10). By reminding the people that Yahweh is their heavenly father, the prophet is highlighting their unique bond as a nation under divine headship. Yet, the people are too self-absorbed to uphold even their most committed attachments, like marriage.
In typical Malachi fashion, his innocent question sets up the divine accusation. Malachi asks, “Why then are we faithless to one another, profaning the covenant of our ancestors?” (2:10). In other words, if the people are unified by their common origin and beliefs, how can they abuse and mistreat each other? The covenant of their ancestors is a reference to God’s giving of the law to Moses on Mount Sinai.
We already know from the first and second disputations that they have broken the terms of their national covenant by being unfaithful to God. Now, we know they are also being unfaithful to each other. Malachi uses all the synonymous names for the nation—Israel, Judah, and Jerusalem—to demonstrate that no one is innocent (2:11).
Malachi accuses Judah of marrying “the daughter of a foreign god” (2:11). Calling the pagan wives “daughter of a foreign god” denotes these are gentiles who did not convert to Judaism. Instead, they maintained their pagan beliefs, infecting the community with idolatry and polytheism. Malachi is not forbidding marriage to gentile neighbors out of racial or national bias. In fact, the Hebrew scriptures uphold proselyte women in their history who declared their allegiance to Yahweh.
Recall that Ruth was a Moabite woman who married into an Israelite immigrant family living in Moab. Yet, it was Ruth the Moabite who made one of the Bible’s most beautiful declarations of covenant loyalty to Yahweh and the nation: “your people shall be my people and your God my God” (Ruth 1:6). Zipporah, the wife of Moses, was a Midianite. Yet, Zipporah is credited with saving the life of Moses by recognizing God’s anger over their uncircumcised son. Tzippora understood Moses’ failure to honor the traditional symbol of his people and she took action (Ex. 4:25). These examples reveal God is concerned with the purity of the nation’s spiritual life, not the purity of bloodlines.
Malachi calls intermarriage an “abomination” that has “profaned the sanctuary” (2:11). Malachi is essentially equating the incorporation of pagan women into the community with placing an idol in the Temple. The community has been set aside as sacred to God, but when they go so far as to make new bonds with heathen neighbors, they pollute the sacred assembly. Malachi is so distressed by the mixed marriages he asks God to cut them off from the community, remove the couples from the “tents of Jacob” (2:12). While all six of Malachi’s disputations spell out the punishments for the highlighted transgression, excommunication is the worst of it.
The hypocritical men go to the Temple to make sacrifices to try and cover over their sins. Malachi accuses the transgressors of “cover the Lord’s altar with tears, with weeping and groaning” (2:13). The pagan practices of their wives had already influenced their approach to Yahweh. Pagan-style worship practices involved crying, groaning, and cutting to manipulate the false gods (Isa. 15:2-3; 1 Kings 18:26-30). The demonstrable performance in the Jerusalem Temple is in vain. Yahweh sees through the emotionalism and he detests the mixture of outward piety and inward depravity.
Prophets prior to Malachi also emphasized God’s demand for justice and obedience over sacrifice. The prophet Micah asked, “Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil?…..what does the Lord require of you but to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:7-8). The emphasis of faithfulness over ritual is one of the most frequent themes in the prophetic books (Isa. 58:6-7).
Remember that Malachi likely ministered sometime right before Ezra and Nehemiah began their campaigns of reform in the restored community. Malachi’s complaints about the pervasiveness of intermarriage correlate exactly with the problems Ezra and Nehemiah faced (Ezra 9-10, Nehemiah 13:23-27). To understand the problem of intermarriage in the community, it is best to read Ezra and Nehemiah for the historical backdrop. In fact, I want to study Ezra and Nehemiah together in Bible Fiber after we finish Malachi.
Ezra first arrived in Jerusalem eighty years after the first wave of exiles returned and began to rebuild the nation. Since the prophets Haggai and Zechariah never mentioned problems with intermarriage in the early community, it must have been a trend that developed with the next generation. By Ezra’s time, heathen marriages were rampant. Ezra plucked his hair out and tore his mantle when he understood the scale of the problem (Ezra 9:3). To him, the marriages were evidence of widespread moral decline. Indeed, the leaders, priests, and officials had “led the way” in the marrying of foreign women (Ezra 9:2). Idolatry had been one of the driving forces behind Israel and Judah’s punishment and captivity.
Why was the remnant introducing paganism and idolatry to the community once again, especially after God had shown them a “brief moment of favor” (Ezra 9:8) by facilitating their return?
Ezra did not invent the laws against intermarriage. God forbid marriage to pagans since the Hebrew people first entered the promised land (Ex. 34:16; Deut. 7:3; Lev. 21:14; Josh. 23:12). Marrying with Canaanite neighbors was the surest way to blur the line between the covenant people and the idolatrous outside world. Perhaps the postexilic community thought the laws against intermarriage only applied to the early days of the conquest. But little had changed in the spiritual beliefs of her neighbors by the fifth century BCE. The Midianites, Moabites, Philistines, and Egyptians were still idol worshiping polytheists.
Once Ezra convinced the community that their actions would lead to divine punishment, the community was eager to repent. They wept alongside Ezra and confessed, “We have broken faith with our God and have married foreign women from the peoples of the land, but even now there is hope for Israel in spite of this” (Ezra 10:2). From Ezra’s perspective, the only solution to restore the community fabric and rid them of the polluting effects of idolatry was to dissolve every illegal marriage (Ezra 10:1-4).
By the time Nehemiah arrived in Jerusalem thirteen years after Ezra’s reforms, it seemed the people refrained from intermarrying. Nehemiah’s followers made an oath to keep their children from going over to marriage with foreigners (Neh. 10:30). However, Nehemiah left Judah and returned to Susa to check-in with the imperial authorities. The text does not indicate how long Nehemiah was absent, but it must have been for some years. When he traveled back to Israel, he was alarmed to find out that the people reverted to intermarriages, at least in the peripheral communities. According to his report, he found that half of the Israelite children in the border towns did not even know Hebrew (Neh. 13:24). These communities were most at risk for intermarriage because they interfaced frequently with the Philistines, Moabites, and Ammonites. For them, Nehemiah feared total assimilation and the loss of Jewish identity.
Nehemiah reminded the returnees of the example of Solomon and his compliance with the cult practices of his many wives (1 Kings 11:1-8). If even the wise King Solomon was held accountable for the sin of pagan marriage, they certainly would be held to account as well (Neh. 13:26). Further, the transgression of the Israelite men was two-sided. Yes, they were marrying pagan women, just as previous generations had done. However, they were upping the ante, because they were also divorcing their Israelite wives in favor of the foreign women.
Malachi accuses the men of being faithless to the wife of their youth (2:14). “Wife of their youth” was another way of saying “first wife.” In ancient Israelite society, parents often arranged marriages for their children. Unlike the illegal marriages to the pagan women, the marriage contracts made within the Judean community had God as the witness (2:14). Having God as a witness to the marriage contract, also places God in the role of enforcer for the marital contract.
What motivated Israelite men to divorce their wives and marry pagan women? The Bible does not explain the reasoning behind the wave of divorces. In earlier times, they would have added wives without divorcing their first wife. Afterall, Solomon had 700 wives (1 Kings 11:3). Technically in a polygamous society, the men did not need to divorce their first wife to marry again. Perhaps though, by the Persian period, polygamy was already fading out as a less than ideal family structure. The Hebrew scriptures never forbid polygamy but overtime the society naturally transitioned to monogamy. The other possibility is that the pagan wives wanted to be the primary wife and not a secondary wife. Often in the polygamous family unit, the first wife was the preferred wife. The foreign wives or their parents may have demanded the Israelite men to divorce their first wife so they could have primacy of place.
The fact these marriages were such a widespread phenomenon in the postexilic community has led some historians to theorize that the main driver may have been financial. When the exiles returned from Babylon to Israel, many returned to their family lands only to find they had new occupants. The neighboring peoples like the Moabites had suffered less under the hands of the Babylonian armies since they had not resisted Babylonian advances with the same force as the Israelites. They may have retained more land, jobs, and businesses than the Israelite exiles who lost everything. Marriage may have been the surest way for them to regain land and occupation.
The first part of Malachi 2:15 is incomplete in even the most ancient versions. The wording is arguably the most difficult to interpret in the whole Hebrew scripture. The NRSVUE translates the verse, “Did God not make them one, flesh with spirit in it? And what does the one desire? Godly offspring” (2:15). No matter the correct reading of Malachi’s argument in 2:15, the imperative at the end of the verse is clear: “do not let anyone be faithless to the wife of his youth” (2:15). Malachi asks the people to return to their first wives.
Malachi firmly states that God “hates” divorce (2:16). Indeed, God did hate the divorces that conveniently disposed of the first wife in favor of the new pagan wife. However, God allowed Ezra to push divorce as the only solution to purge the remnant of the idolatrous marriages. Those mixed marriages were apparently different because they did not have God as a witness. Our modern equivalent to the concept of Ezra’s mass call for divorce would be annulments, voiding marriages that were never legal in the first place.
At the end of the disputation, another difficult verse has God declaring his hatred for the “covering one’s garment with violence” (2:16). Two possible meanings can derive from this declaration. In biblical times, covering a woman with your garment may have been figurative expression for entering into a marriage contract. The story of Boaz and Ruth uses the same language (Ruth 3:9). The NIV follows this logic and translates the verse “does violence to the one he should protect,” with “the one” being the wife. God hates Israelite men who do harm to the wife they were supposed to protect.
However, the wording about a garment being covered in violence may connect back to Malachi’s depiction earlier in the disputation of Israelite men offering hypocritical sacrifices in the Temple, weeping and groaning at the altar (2:13). The transgressors were going to the Temple to make a show of their offerings and sacrifices, despite living in active rebellion against the covenant. Now Malachi envisions their garments bloodied from the act of animal sacrifice which we can assume they exaggerated like in pagan rituals. Because God desires obedience and individual morality, he refuses their offerings.
Interestingly, Malachi possesses a higher view of marriage than the law or the earlier prophets. Malachi understands the controversial nature of his message so he regularly reminds his audience that “Yahweh, God of armies” and “Yahweh, God of Israel” is the authority giving voice to his oracle. Mosaic law allowed divorce, even if it regulated the manner of divorce (Deut. 24:1-4).
Jesus continues on the message of Malachi. He too reminds those in the covenant community that God hates divorce. Jesus, on most matters of the covenant, spoke to the spirit of the law rather than the letter. For that reason, his critics believed him to be soft on Sabbath, Kashrut, and purity. Marriage is one of the few exceptions where Jesus came down even stricter than the Torah (Matt. 5:31-32). When the Pharisees challenged Jesus with a question about divorce, he shot back that the laws of Moses only allowed for divorce because hard-heartedness had entered the community (Matt. 19:8). In God’s perfect plan for the world, male and female were designed to become one flesh as a divine institution. Jesus said, “what God has joined together, let no one separate” (Matt. 19:6).
Because we live in a broken world, both the Hebrew scriptures and the New Testament layout terms for divorce and provide regulations for ending the marriage contract. But in an ideal, healed, redeemed world, Malachi and Jesus give every indication that marriage is one area of our lives to hold the most sacred. Indeed, if you are blessed in this life to be in a godly mutually edifying marriage, you are standing on holy ground. You are blessed to see a sliver of the world to come.
If marriage has been a source of pain in your life, as I know it has been for many of my God-fearing friends, I am sorry. You are a victim to broken promises, just like the first wives in the restored community of Israel. Still, hold to the promise that Jesus promised he will return and he will “make all things new” (Rev. 21:5).
Join me next week for the fourth disputation in Malachi which covers Malachi 2:17 to 3:6. Malachi encourages the people that a messenger is coming!
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Shabbat Shalom