Ernest Davis
December 2025
I learned a number of things. Some of them were answers to questions that I was wondering about, some I stumbled across purely by accident. Some are surely known by tens or hundreds of millions of people but were news to me; some are obscure; none are original. But I think some of what I learned might interest some of my friends, so I have written them up.
I'll start with some basic background, which largely corresponds to what I knew about all this before this week. Then I'll discuss the things I learned. Then I'll muse about one question whose answer cannot be known. I'll end with two timelines: the history of my own encounters with this material, and a historical timeline.
The book of Malachi has three chapters (or four, depending how you count — see below). The important texts for our discussion are the beginning of chapter 3, Malachi 2:17-3:4 and the end of chapter 3, Malachi 3:22-24. (I'll explain below why I start with 2:17 rather than 3:1.)
Hebrew original
2:17
הוֹגַעְתֶּ֤ם יְהֹוָה֙ בְּדִבְרֵיכֶ֔ם וַאֲמַרְתֶּ֖ם בַּמָּ֣ה הוֹגָ֑עְנוּ בֶּאֱמׇרְכֶ֗ם כׇּל־עֹ֨שֵׂה רָ֜ע ט֣וֹב ׀ בְּעֵינֵ֣י יְהֹוָ֗ה וּבָהֶם֙ ה֣וּא חָפֵ֔ץ א֥וֹ אַיֵּ֖ה אֱלֹהֵ֥י הַמִּשְׁפָּֽט׃
3:1
הִנְנִ֤י שֹׁלֵ֙חַ֙ מַלְאָכִ֔י וּפִנָּה־דֶ֖רֶךְ לְפָנָ֑י וּפִתְאֹם֩ יָב֨וֹא אֶל־הֵיכָל֜וֹ הָאָד֣וֹן ׀ אֲשֶׁר־אַתֶּ֣ם מְבַקְשִׁ֗ים וּמַלְאַ֨ךְ הַבְּרִ֜ית אֲשֶׁר־אַתֶּ֤ם חֲפֵצִים֙ הִנֵּה־בָ֔א אָמַ֖ר יְהֹוָ֥ה צְבָאֽוֹת׃
3:2
וּמִ֤י מְכַלְכֵּל֙ אֶת־י֣וֹם בּוֹא֔וֹ וּמִ֥י הָעֹמֵ֖ד בְּהֵרָאוֹת֑וֹ כִּי־הוּא֙ כְּאֵ֣שׁ מְצָרֵ֔ף וּכְבֹרִ֖ית מְכַבְּסִֽים׃
3:3
וְיָשַׁ֨ב מְצָרֵ֤ף וּמְטַהֵר֙ כֶּ֔סֶף וְטִהַ֤ר אֶת־בְּנֵֽי־לֵוִי֙ וְזִקַּ֣ק אֹתָ֔ם כַּזָּהָ֖ב וְכַכָּ֑סֶף וְהָיוּ֙ לַֽיהֹוָ֔ה מַגִּישֵׁ֥י מִנְחָ֖ה בִּצְדָקָֽה׃
3:4
וְעָֽרְבָה֙ לַֽיהֹוָ֔ה מִנְחַ֥ת יְהוּדָ֖ה וִירוּשָׁלָ֑͏ִם כִּימֵ֣י עוֹלָ֔ם וּכְשָׁנִ֖ים קַדְמֹנִיֹּֽת׃
King James Translation: (I use the King James translation (KJV) throughout, except where noted, because that was the translation adapted for Handel's Messiah, and because, for the most part, it seems to me as good a translation of these passages as any that I have seen. However, I use the chapter and verse numbering of the standard Hebrew Bible. See discussion below. I have written separately a comparison of Robert Alter's translations with the King James.)
2:17 Ye have wearied the LORD with your words. Yet ye say, Wherein have we wearied him? When ye say, Every one that doeth evil is good in the sight of the LORD, and he delighteth in them; or, Where is the God of judgment?
3:1 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.
3:2 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.
3:3 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.
3:4 Then shall the offering of Judah and Jerusalem be pleasant unto the LORD, as in the days of old, and as in former years.
Hebrew original
3:22
זִכְר֕וּ תּוֹרַ֖ת מֹשֶׁ֣ה עַבְדִּ֑י אֲשֶׁר֩ צִוִּ֨יתִי אוֹת֤וֹ בְחֹרֵב֙ עַל־כׇּל־יִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל חֻקִּ֖ים וּמִשְׁפָּטִֽים׃
3:23
הִנֵּ֤ה אָנֹכִי֙ שֹׁלֵ֣חַ לָכֶ֔ם אֵ֖ת אֵלִיָּ֣ה הַנָּבִ֑יא לִפְנֵ֗י בּ֚וֹא י֣וֹם יְהֹוָ֔ה הַגָּד֖וֹל וְהַנּוֹרָֽא׃
3:24
הֵשִׁ֤יב לֵב־אָבוֹת֙ עַל־בָּנִ֔ים וְלֵ֥ב בָּנִ֖ים עַל־אֲבוֹתָ֑ם פֶּן־אָב֕וֹא וְהִכֵּיתִ֥י אֶת־הָאָ֖רֶץ חֵֽרֶם׃
King James Translation
3:22 Remember ye the law of Moses my servant, which I commanded unto him in Horeb for all Israel, with the statutes and judgments.
3:23 Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the LORD:
3:24 And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.
Robert Alter comments on 3:23: "This verse inaugurates a rich legendary tradition in which Elijah is imagined as the harbinger of the messiah. Elijah would appear to be a different harbinger than the "messenger" mentioned in 3:1, and it is by no means certain that these concluding verses are from the same hand as the rest of the book. Whether this text is drawing on an already existent folk tradition is a matter of speculation."
The idea that what primarily will have to be done to prepare the world for redemption is to reconcile the older generation and the younger generation, in both directions, seems to me a remarkable one. I don't remember seeing a similar claim anywhere else. No doubt many sermons have taken it as a text.
Scene 2 of Messiah consists of three pieces.
Thus saith the Lord
Andante 4/4 time in d minor, sung by bass. This has two parts:
Part I. This starts as a recitative, but turns into a song, with repeated words,
passage work, and a melodic development.
The text is Haggai 2:6-7, somewhat edited: "Thus saith the Lord of Hosts: Yet
once a little while, and I will shake the heavens and the earth, the sea and the
dry land, all nations I'll shake, and the desire of all nations shall come.
Part II: Short unmelodic recitative. The text is Malachi 3:1 "The Lord
whom ye seek will 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?
Aria by bass, alto, or soprano:
Part 1: Larghetto in d minor, 3/8 time. Text modified from Malachi 3:2: "But who shall abide the day of His coming? And who shall stand when He appeareth".
Part II: Prestissimo in d minor, 4/4 time. Text: "For he is like a refiner's fine,
and who shall stand when He appeareth?
Part I: Repeated.
Part II: Repeated.
Coda: Adagio to the words "For he is like a refiner's fire"
followed by a purely instrumental prestissimo.
As I said in the introduction, I find this, particularly the mournful Larghetto,
one of the most beautiful pieces in Messiah. It is also a showpiece
for a singer: The Larghetto gives opportunities for Baroque ornamentation; the
passage work in the Prestissimo is virtuosic; and the singer can completely go to
town in the short cadenza in the Coda.
And he shall purify the sons of Levi
Chorus in g minor 4/4 time.
Text modified from Malachi 3:3 "And he shall purify
the sons of Levi that they may offer unto the Lord an offering in righteousness"
Very contrapuntal.
A couple of more comments about Malachi in the Jewish tradition:
1. After the Amidah, the central prayer of each Jewish service, two paragraphs are recited. The second is a prayer for the restoration of the Temple, and it ends with Malachi 3:4. As far as I can remember, this and the haftara for Shabbat ha-Gadol are the only passages from Malachi included in the traditional liturgy.
2. There is a cheerful song in Hebrew to the words of Malachi 3:23 and the first half of 3:24, I imagine of fairly recent composition. Here is a link.
3. To modern liberal religious sensibilities, surely the most congenial
passage from Malachi is the first half of Malachi 2:10:
הֲל֨וֹא אָ֤ב אֶחָד֙ לְכֻלָּ֔נוּ הֲל֛וֹא אֵ֥ל אֶחָ֖ד בְּרָאָ֑נוּ
"Have we not all one father? Did not one God create us?"
I have seen this quoted in essays and heard it quoted in sermons. But it is not in the
traditional liturgy, and I don't know of anyone who has put it to music.
I felt pretty foolish when I found that, in fact, the use of Malachi 3:1 goes back to the absolute beginning of Christianity. To be precise, the second verse of the Gospel of Mark — generally considered the oldest of the Gospels — is a quotation of Malachi 3:1, presented as a prophecy of John the Baptist. In the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, Jesus quotes the verse and likewise states that it is a prophecy of John the Baptist.
Mark 1:2-3 (English Standard Version): As it is written in Isaiah the prophet, “Behold, I send my messenger before your face, who will prepare your way, the voice of one crying in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight,’”
Matthew 11:10 (KJV): For this is he, of whom it is written, Behold, I send my messenger before thy face, which shall prepare thy way before thee.
Luke 7:27 (KJV): This is he, of whom it is written, Behold, I send my messenger before thy face, which shall prepare thy way before thee.
There are a couple of further points to notice about this:
Mark follows the quotation of Malachi 3:1 by Isaiah 40:3, and attributes both sayings to Isaiah. (The King James Version corrects the Evangelist on this misattribution; in KJV, the verse begins, "As it is written in the prophets".)
The beginning of Isaiah 40 and the beginning of Malachi 3 have a number of features in common, in terms of the issues discussed here. Isaiah 40:1-3 are pieces
2-4 of Handel's Messiah. Isaiah 40:1-26 is the haftara for a calendrically
notable Shabbat, the Shabbat after the fast Tisha b'Av, known as "Shabbat Nahamu" after the first word of Isaiah 40:1.
Like Malachi, the author of Isaiah 40 (so-called "Deutero-Isaiah") was a post-Exilic
prophet whose real name may well be unknown.
("In at least two instances it can be demonstrated that this oblivion
was deliberately
chosen. The name of Deutero-Isaiah, presumably a household word in his
day, could
scarcely have been forgotten, except through his own determination
and that of his
disciples. Malachi (My messenger) was apparently a title given a Prophet
who wished to remain anonymous."
Louis Finkelstein, "The ethics of anonymity among the Pharisees",
Conservative Judaism,, 12 1958.)
A few verses further on in Matthew, Jesus mentions Elijah the prophet in connection with John the Baptist, thus perhaps implicitly referencing Malachi 3:23.
Matthew 11:14 "And if you are willing to accept it, he [John] is the Elijah who was to come."
(Elijah appears prominently several other times in the Gospels: see
Matthew 17:3, 17:10, 27:47; Mark 9:11, 15:16, 15:35; Luke 9:30-33)
The text of the Malachi 3:1 as quoted in the Gospels is a little different from the text in our version of Malachi. I have not (because I can't) check whether the Gospels differs from the Septuagint.
The question remains, though, what did the Christian tradition do with the other verses from Malachi? In particular, what did Christians in Handel's time think that they meant? As far as I know, John the Baptist was not, in his lifetime, very much like a refiner's fire or fuller's soap, and there is no evidence that he was particularly concerned with purifying the sons of Levi, let alone that he accomplished it. Undoubtedly, there is plenty that one could find out about these; one place to start would be with the collection of a dozen Christian Bible commentaries at biblehub.com. However, I leave that to other people.
These questions are bound together, at least to the extent that they are both answered in an article "The Term Shabbat HaGadol" by Mitchell First. First, however, we must justify the presupposition of the first of these questions:
There are two answers. First, 3:4 is obviously a continuation of the thought in 3:2-3: The messenger of God will purify the sons of Levi, they will offer the grain offering to the Lord in righteousness (or, translating Malachi's text more literally, they themselves will metaphorically be grain offerings), so (3:4) the grain offering will again be pleasant to the Lord.
Second, different traditions segment the end of Malachi in different ways, but none of them puts a break between 3:3 and 3:4.
17. You have wearied the LORD. This verse might be the introduction to the prophecy in the next chapter because the malfeasance now is not divorce [ the previous subject in chapter 2] but a general perversion or rejection of divine justice.On the other hand, Alter translates almost all of chapter 2 including 2:17 as prose, whereas he translates all of chapter 3 as poetry, so he does mark a division between the two.
OK, that's why the haftara should not start with 3:4 which is in the middle of things. So why does it start there? The answer is simple. Most years, parshat ha-shavua (the weekly Torah reading) for Shabbat HaGadol is Tzav (Leviticus 6:1-8:36) which includes a discussion of the grain offering, so the first sentence of the haftara establishes a connection to the Torah reading.
As for the second question: The earliest record we have of Malachi being read as the haftara is in Minhagei Maharil, a collection of customs authored by the Maharil (Ya'akov ben Moshe Levi Moelin, c. 1365-1427), compiled by his student Zalman of Sankt Goar, and first published in 1556. The Minhagei Maharil states, in the chapter הלכות חלוקי הפטורת , that some read Malachi 3:4-24 on the Shabbat before Pesach, whereas others read it only if the Shabbat is the day before Pesach (i.e. the first Seder is that evening.) (The latter is the custom among Chabad Hasidim.)
Nonetheless, it seems probable that the end of the haftara predicting the coming of Elijah is also part of the reason it was chosen for Shabbat ha-Gadol. It also seems possible that one further reason for not starting the haftara at Malachi 3:1 or 2:17 is the Christological associations of 3:1.
If a translator adheres to the convention that pronouns that refer to the Deity are capitalized, then they must make a decision about all these. The King James translation used lower-case pronouns for God, so it sidesteps the problem. The autograph score of Handel's Messiah has "whom ye delight in", but capitalizes all the rest. The revised JPS translation has "the Sovereign you seek", "the angel of the covenant that you desire, he is already coming", "the day of his coming", "when he appears", "he is like a smelter's fire" "he shall purify the descendants of Levi". Robert Alter's translation has "whom ye desire", "look, he comes", "the day of His coming", "when He appears", "He is like the smelter's fire", "the smelter shall ... purify the sons of Levi". Robert Alter comments on this: "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."
First questions: What is a fuller? And what kinds of soap does a fuller use?
Fortunately, there is a Wikipedia article about fulling:
Fulling ... 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. The work delivers a smooth, tightly finished fabric that is insulating and water-repellent.
Clearly, fulling in general is quite a different process from ordinary laundering. However whether, in Malachi's time or in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, fullers and lauderers used the same or different soaps, I don't know. LIkewise I don't know how familiar the readers/hearers in Malachi's time, or King James', or Handel's would have been with the process of fulling or the soap/lye that was used.
For you must know, dear reader, that when I was about nine years old, I discovered The Complete Sherlock Holmes on my parents' bookshelf and I was head-over-heels captivated. I read it over and over and over again. I learned substantial chunks of the stories by heart. I knew the four novels and fifty-six short stories that comprise the canon of Sherlock Holmes better than I have ever known anything else.
And the story "The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb" from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes contains the following bit of dialogue:
`You are probably aware that fuller’s-earth is a valuable product, and that it is only found in one or two places in England?’‘I have heard so.’
‘Some little time ago I bought a small place—a very small place—within ten miles of Reading. I was fortunate enough to discover that there was a deposit of fuller’s-earth in one of my fields.'
When I read this, in 1965 or so, I had wondered a little what fuller's earth might be, but I was not so curious that I made any effort to find out. Now, at long last, I knew. To quote Wikipedia again:
Fuller's earth is any of various clays used as an absorbent, filter, or bleaching agent. ... In past centuries, fullers kneaded fuller's earth and water into woollen cloth to absorb lanolin, oils, and other greasy impurities as part of the cloth finishing process.
What would the Prophet Malachi have thought?
Malachi was a prophet — I don't think that it can now be understood what that really was. He believed that he had a particular kind of relation to the God of Israel, and that he was able to speak the words of God to his people, and, in particular, to communicate insights about what the future held in store for them.
Did Malachi have any sense of the extraordinary destiny of his own words? Did he to any degree foresee that, millennia after the Temple of Jerusalem was destroyed and the grain offerings to the God of Israel ceased, his words would still resonate; that they would be translated into hundreds of languages; that they would inspire beautiful music? If he could have heard Handel's setting of "But who shall abide", would he have recognized some reflection of his own spirit?
I like to think that he would. If you will excuse the fantasy: I like to think that when, after his seventy-four year sojourn in the World of Illusion, Handel was welcomed to World of Truth, he soon had the opportunity to conduct the Heavenly Orchestra and the Heavenly Choir in a performance of Messiah (on period instruments, naturally); and that the prophet Malachi was in the audience and was delighted by the music; and that, when the performance was over, the ancient prophet went up to the old composer and said, "Dear George Frideric, that was wonderful. You have understood the meaning of my words, and your music expresses it."
Few of these are precise, and some are quite uncertain..
9 years old. I read "The Engineer's Thumb." I don't know what "fuller's earth" means.
11 or 12. I hear the haftara of Shabbat ha-Gadol in shul for the first time.
17ish. I become acquainted with Handel's Messiah. I buy the score in voice-piano
arrangement. I buy a recording on two cassette tapes.
18. I learn the zemer, "Hinei anochi sholeah lachem" at the MIT Kosher Kitchen.
19. I participate in an informal open choral performance of part I of Messiah at MIT.
(The soloists were trained singers; the choristers, including myself, were mostly incompetent.)
23. I hear a live performance of The Messiah at Carnegie Hall.
25ish. I read through all of Tanakh — this is probably the first time I have read
chapters 1 and 2 of Malachi. I read the Gospels -- clearly, not carefully enough.
69. I learn the meaning of "fuller's earth".
* "Do not look so sad. We shall meet soon again."
"Please, Aslan," said Lucy, "What do you call soon?"
"I call all times soon," said Aslan.
— C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
Acknowledgement: As always, I am grateful to my brother Joey for helpful feedback and in particular for pointing out Mitchell First's article and the commentaries at BibleHub.