Ernest Davis
December 25, 2025.
הנני שלח מלאכי ופנה דרך לפני ופתאם יבוא אל היכלו האדון אשר אתם מבקשים ומלאך הברית אשר אתם חפצים הנה בא אמר יהוה צבאות
ומי מכלכל את יום בואו ומי העמד בהראותו כי הוא כאש מצרף וכברית מכבסים
ישב מצרף ומטהר כסף וטהר את בני לוי וזקק אתם כזהב וככסף והיו ליהוה מגישי מנחה בצדקה
וערבה ליהוה מנחת יהודה וירושלם כימי עולם וכשנים קדמניות
Robert Alter's translation
I am about to send My messenger
and he shall clear the way before Me.
In a trice He shall enter His Temple
the Master Whom you seek
and the covenant's messenger whom ye desire,
look, he comes, says the Lord of Armies.
And who can bear the day of His coming
and who can stand when He appears?
For He is like the smelter's fire
and like the launderer's lye.
And the smelter shall sit and purify silver
and purify the sons of Levi
and refine them like gold and silver
and they shall become grain offerings to the LORD in righteousness.
And the grain offering of Judah and Jerusalem
shall be sweet to the LORD
as in days of yore and in former years.
Alter's comment The day of His coming Because of the fiery power of the one who comes, it is most probably God, even though grammatically the pronomial references might be attached to the divine messenger
King James: Behold, I will send my messenger, and he shall prepare the way before me: and the Lord, whom ye seek, shall suddenly come to his temple, even the messenger of the covenant, whom ye delight in: behold, he shall come, saith the LORD of hosts.
But who may abide the day of his coming? and who shall stand when he appeareth? for he is like a refiner's fire, and like fullers' soap.
And he shall sit as a refiner and purifier of silver: and he shall purify the sons of Levi, and purge them as gold and silver, that they may offer unto the LORD an offering in righteousness.
Then shall the offering of Judah and Jerusalem be pleasant unto the LORD, as in the days of old, and as in former years.
The main difference between the two translations
is that Alter modernizes the language:
"abide" to "bear",
"ye" to "you", "refiner" to "smelter" and so on. In two cases, Alter's language actually seems more archaic, or more twee, than the King James: he changes
"suddenly" to
"in a trice", and "days of old" to "days of yore".
There is a significant difference
in meaning at the end of verse 3:
Alter's "and they shall become grain offerings to the LORD in righteousness" is much closer to the ungainly metaphor in the original than the King James' "that they may offer unto the LORD an offering in righteousness."
In general, Alter closely follows the word order of the Hebrew, whenever that is possible in English; the King James is freer.
The change of "fuller's soap" to "lauderer's lye" is harder to evaluate.
Fulling, according to Wikipedia, "is a step in woollen clothmaking which involves the cleansing of woven cloth (particularly wool) to eliminate (lanolin) oils, dirt, and other impurities, and to make it shrink by friction and pressure." So it is not
the same thing as laundering. In modern Hebrew, the phrase בורית מכבסים just means laundary detergent. But I don't know whether there were two different kinds of
cleaning agent used for wool in the Prophet Malachi's time or in King James' time; perhaps
the same lye or soap was used in ordinary laundering as in fulling. No modern translation that is at all faithful to the original can avoid the anti-climax from "refiner's fire" to "laundary detergent", which presumably the Prophet did not intend. (Charles Jennens, the librettist for Handel's Messiah wisely omitted the
fuller's soap.)
Alter, unlike the King James translation, follows the convention of capitalizing pronouns referring to the
Deity and must therefore decide on the referents of "he" and "his" in in verses 1 and 2. Alter goes with "he shall clear", "He shall enter". "His Temple", "the Master Whom you seek", "the messenger ... whom you desire", "look he comes", in verse 1; "His coming", "He appears", "He is like the smelter's fire" in verse 2. That doesn't seem to me entirely plausible — one would at least suppose that "His coming"
at the start of verse 2 is the same as "look he comes" at the end of verse 1 —
but it is difficult to find an entirely satisfactory assignment. The Prophet may not
have distinguished very clearly between God and His messenger, in any case.
This is part of a more general discussion of Robert Alter's translation> by Ernest Davis.