Section IIGod's Love for Israel

Malachi 1:2-5

The oracle begins almost abruptly with a tender and plaintive word of the Lord to Israel: I have loved you (2). This is the real burden of Malachi's prophecy; everything else is to be viewed in the light of this fundamental claim.¹ But the people are skeptical: Wherein hast thou loved us? They see no evidence of God's love. Poverty-stricken and suffering, they are a disheartened and disillusioned people. Their thought is clouded by doubt. Everything the prophet says is challenged: Yet ye say.² Malachi has to argue his points with a people who are at least critical and in part hostile. He here asserts a view of God's love that goes back to Deut. 7:8 (cf. Hos. 11:1), which declares that God chose Jacob because He loved him.

The proof of God's love for Jacob is seen in His overthrow of Esau (3). Esau and Jacob are here the nations of Edom (4) and Israel (5). God's love for Israel is proven by His punishment of Edom. Edom had not only failed to come to the help of Jerusalem when the city was besieged by the Babylonians in 586 B.C., but had actually rejoiced in its fall (Lam. 4:21-22; Ps. 137:7). As a result, during the postexilic period Edom became a living symbol of cruelty and faithlessness, ripe for destruction (Ezek. 25:12; Obad., 21). Therefore the expulsion of the Edomites from their old territory of Mount Seir by the Nabatean Arabs was seen as an act of divine vengeance for their unbrotherly and inhuman conduct (3). We do not know the date of this event, but it was apparently recent enough at the time of the writing to be fresh in the minds of the Jews.

The Edomites regarded the calamity which had befallen them as merely a temporary setback and looked forward to reestablishing themselves in their original territory. But Malachi declares that their ruin is permanent: They shall build, but I will throw down; and they shall call them, The border of wickedness, and, The people against whom the Lord hath indignation for ever (4). This will provide incontrovertible evidence to future generations, Malachi is saying, of the wickedness of Edom and the judgment of God. Edom was called The border of wickedness ( “The Criminal Land,” Moffatt). On the other hand, it will provide Israel with indisputable proof of God's sovereign care. Furthermore, this will prove that the Lord is no petty national deity; it will enable Israel to say, “Great is the Lord, beyond the border of Israel!” (5, RSV) “Malachi's prophecy proved correct,” Dentan points out, “and Edom never returned to her former lands. The Edomites (Idumaeans) remained settled in southern Palestine. … By a curious irony of history it was from these same Idumeans that the family of the Herods came.”³