2. give honor to My name. This phrasing reflects a tendency in the Second Temple period to substitute God’s “name” for direct references to the deity.

make your blessings curses. The literal sense is “curse your blessings,” but this is the obvious meaning. An important function of the priests was to bless the people.

3. your seed. It is not entirely clear whether the reference is to the offspring of the priests or to anything, literal or figurative, that they plant.

scatter dung on your faces. Though shameful and disgusting for anyone, this is particularly disgraceful for priests, who are obliged to remain in a condition of purity.

it shall carry you off to where it is. The translation reflects the obscurity of the Hebrew. What might be intended is the dung-heap, but it remains puzzling how dung scattered on a face could carry a person off.

6. A teaching of truth. An important responsibility of the priests was to provide instruction (torah) to the people concerning the laws and moral imperatives they were obliged to observe. But the term also has the sense of judicial ruling, as in verses 7, 8, and 9.

9. showing favoritism in rulings. This perversion of justice is precisely what a judge is enjoined not to do.

11. coupled with the daughter of an alien god. The prophet here, like Ezra, inveighs against mixed marriages, though he may be referring simply to sexual relations with foreign women. Calling such a woman “daughter of an alien god” is a way of stressing the involvement of non-Israelite women in paganisim.

12. a witness and answerer. The received text says ʿer, “one awake,” which this translation, following one version of the Septuagint, emends to ʿed. Given the parallelism with “bringer of grain offering to the LORD,” this would then refer to a priestly function—perhaps, bearing witness in legal matters.

13. cause to cover with tears. While the literal sense of the Hebrew is simply “cover with tears,” this could not be the act of the priests, for that would suggest profound contrition. Rather, by consorting with alien women, the priests impel God to reject their offerings on the altar, and thus the people they serve are stricken with despair and weep in the Temple.

14. It was you who betrayed her when she was your friend and your covenanted wife. Since the next verse explicitly mentions divorce, one must conclude that the prophet actually rejects divorce as a “betrayal” of one’s wife. This view puts aside the legislated provision for divorce in the Torah. It is an attitude adopted by Jesus in Matthew.

15. And did not one do [right]. The entire sentence is obscure. Some interpreters think that “one” refers to God, but that seems strained. The understanding reflected in this translation is: although many among you have betrayed your spouses by divorcing them (and perhaps taking foreign women as mates), there is one—implicitly, a few—among you of “exceeding spirit” who does the right thing. (The word “right” has been added speculatively, in brackets.) What this person seeks is the “seed of God,” which would be pure Israelite offspring. If in fact this whole passage is addressed to the priests, it may be that Malachi objects only to divorce among priests, not to divorce in general. The wording, however, at the beginning of the next verse, “For I hate divorce, said the LORD,” does sound like a generalizing statement.

16. I hate divorce. Unfortunately, the “I” is lacking in the Hebrew text, opening up a window of ambiguity as to what these words mean.

17. You have wearied the LORD. This verse might be the introduction to the prophecy recorded in the next chapter because the malfeasance now is not divorce but a general perversion or rejection of divine justice.