temptation, and to make very clear to them the way of duty. This ideal,
the prophet declares, was realized by earlier priests, but now those who
are the appointed religious guides are misleading the people.

III. The Need of a Great Moral Awakening. The evils which the prophet
denounced were not confined to the priests. The old Semitic law regarding
divorce was exceedingly lax. A husband could lead his wife to the door of
his tent and tell her to be gone, thereby severing their marriage
relation. The Deuteronomic law sought to relieve this injustice by
providing that the husband must place in the hand of his wife, as she
departs, a document stating the grounds on which he had divorced her. By
the middle of the fifth century B.C. divorce had evidently become
exceedingly common in Palestine. The prophet denounced it on the basis of
its injustice and cruelty. He also maintained that marriage was a solemn
covenant before Jehovah between man and wife, and that he who disregarded
it dealt faithlessly and was the especial object of divine displeasure.

Traces of the old heathenism still remained in Judah, and the dependent,
oppressed classes received little pity from the selfish, heartless rulers.
In the face of these evils the prophet declared that Jehovah would
surely send a messenger to punish and to reform priest and people.
The prophecy was evidently based on a clear recognition that Jehovah
was ever working to train and uplift his people, and that a period of
degeneration must surely be followed by a period of reform. In the work
of Nehemiah the prophet's hopes were in part fulfilled, but the larger
fulfilment of the underlying principle was realized in the thorough-going
reformatory work of John the Baptist and in that of the Great Teacher. In
a later appendix to the prophecy of Malachi this theme is still further
developed. The promise is made that another prophet, with the zeal of the
great reformer Elijah, would come and prepare the way for a new and nobler