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 that He will suddenly come to His temple, but that before His coming He will send a messenger to prepare the way for Him. The announcement of this messenger rests upon the prophecy in Isa 40:3., as the expression וּפנּה דרך, which is borrowed from that passage, clearly shows. The person whose voice Isaiah heard calling to make the way of Jehovah in the desert, that the glory of the Lord might be revealed to all flesh, is here described as מלאך, whom Jehovah will send before Him, i.e., before His coming. This maleâkh is not a heavenly messenger, or spiritual being (Rashi, Kimchi), nor the angel of Jehovah κατ ̓ ἐξοχήν, who is mentioned afterwards and called maleakh habberı̄th, but an earthly messenger of the Lord, and indeed the same who is called the prophet Elijah in Mal 4:5, and therefore not “an ideal person, viz., the whole choir of divine messengers, who are to prepare the way for the coming of salvation, and open the door for the future grace” (Hengst.), but a concrete personality - a messenger who was really sent to the nation in John the Baptist immediately before the coming of the Lord. The idea view is precluded not only by the historical fact, that not a single prophet arose in Israel during the whole period between Malachi and John, but also by the context of the passage before us, according to which the sending of the messenger was to take place immediately before the coming of the Lord to His temple. It is true that in Mal 2:7 the priest is also called a messenger of Jehovah; but the expression הנני שׁלח (behold I send) prevents our understanding the term maleâkh as referring to the priests, or even as including them, inasmuch as “sending” would not apply to the priests as the standing mediators between the Lord and His people. Moreover, it was because the priests did not fulfil their duty as the ordinary ambassadors of God that the Lord was about to send an extraordinary messenger. Preparing the way (פּנה דרך, an expression peculiar to Isaiah: compare Isa 40:3; also, Isa 57:14 and Isa 62:10), by clearing away the impediments lying in the road, denotes the removal of all that retards the coming of the Lord to His people, i.e., the taking away of enmity to God and of ungodliness by the preaching of repentance and the conversion of sinners. The announcement of this messenger therefore implied, that the nation in its existing moral condition was not yet prepared for the reception of the Lord, and therefore had