Apologetics
Southwestern Journal of Theology
Volume 60, No. 2 – Spring 2018
Managing Editor: W. Madison Grace II
By Allen P. Ross. Wooster, Ohio: Weaver Book Co., 2016. 272 pages. Paperback, $17.99.
Grammarian and Old Testament scholar Allen Ross has accomplished what he intended (viii–ix): he has written a guide from exegesis of the Hebrew text to exposition in English with application, using Malachi as the text. This approach results in a commentary on the prophetic booklet that falls comfortably within conservative theology. Malachi Then and Now could serve as the primary text for Bible students’s first exegesis course after completing a full elementary Hebrew text, such as Ross’s own. The author has provided readers with parsings, grammatical functions, and lexical information for most of the significant words and phrases in the whole book of Malachi. He has translated every verse and commented on the occasional textual difficulties.
In a way, this book is like the ideal exegetical paper and the ideal homiletic practicum paper, combined and extended to cover all of Malachi. The exceptions to this comparison are easy to identify with the book in hand. First, Ross rarely interacts explicitly with other scholarship in his exegesis. There are limited footnotes and no endnotes, but the reader might notice that Ross is aware of what others have said about the text (e.g., 51 on a theoretical setting of Mal 1:6–14). Second, Ross includes application, but he does not include stories and other illustrations typical of sermons. Someone teaching through Malachi with Malachi Then and Now in hand will find a thorough guide through the meaning of the biblical text with help for structuring sermons and principles for application that need audience-specific examples to connect best with hearers.
A few strong and/or interesting points highlight what characterizes Ross’s work. Ross distinguishes between atonement provided by animal sacrifices and that provided by Christ in the New Testament—the former addresses sanctification within the covenant relationship, while the latter includes justification (51, 61n6). Happily, Ross understands Malachi 1:9a (“So now, implore God so that he may be gracious to us.”) as the prophet’s sincere instruction rather than an ironic quotation from insincere priests. The author also accepts the reference to Levi in Malachi 2:4 as a metonymy, referring to the whole tribe that comes from Levi (75n6, 79). And so, the idyllic priests depicted by metonymy are an unspecified bunch of “early priests” (87). This interpretation affords the prophet more credibility than supposing, with some scholars, that Malachi 2:5–9 drew on a fictitious archetype of a priest. Ross argues that Malachi 2:10–16 regarded marriage as a covenant witnessed by God to fulfill his plan for his people (120–23). Finally, Ross interprets Malachi’s eschatology in dialogue with New Testament eschatology, developed around a first and second coming of Jesus the Messiah (see 132–34, 141, 178–81, 191). The book concludes with a summary of Malachi’s sections and a discussion of the Christian doctrines derived from Malachi.
