A book whose title may not be a name, arguing with a congregation that has stopped believing the arrangement works. It closes the Christian Old Testament, and the argument it records is unusually specific.
What the book is
Malachi is six disputations. Each opens with a divine assertion, records the audience’s objection in their own voice, and answers it. The subjects are concrete: priests offering defective animals, men divorcing their wives, tithes withheld, and the complaint that it does not pay to serve God because the arrogant prosper.
The name Malachi means my messenger, and the same word appears in chapter 3 as a common noun. Whether the book is anonymous and took its title from that verse, or whether Malachi was a person, is genuinely undecided.
How it is put together
The disputation form is consistent enough to be the organising principle of the whole book. It is a distinctive rhetorical structure and it makes the audience’s position audible, which is rare: we get to hear the objections, not only the answers.
The closing verses, on the return of Elijah before the great day, are the last words of the Christian Old Testament by arrangement rather than by chronology, and that placement has shaped how the book is read.
The dating question
The internal evidence is consistent and points to the Persian period. The temple is standing and sacrifices are being offered, which puts the book after 515 BCE. The ruler is called by the Persian term for a provincial governor rather than king. The concerns — mixed marriage, tithes, priestly standards — match those of Ezra and Nehemiah.
The usual range is the mid-fifth century BCE, with some placing it slightly earlier or later. This is one of the more stable datings in the prophetic corpus, and it rests on institutional references rather than on a claim about prediction.
Where the external record touches it
The Elephantine papyri are the most useful external material for this book. They are Aramaic documents from a Judaean garrison community in southern Egypt in the fifth century BCE: letters, contracts, marriage documents and legal cases. They show a Judaean community with its own temple, correspondence with the authorities in Jerusalem and Samaria, and marriage practice that included Egyptian spouses.
They do not mention Malachi and do not confirm anything in it. What they do is corroborate the world the book assumes — a dispersed Judaean population under Persian administration, in contact with Jerusalem, with live questions about intermarriage and about how a temple community should behave.
For the province of Yehud itself, the external record is mainly administrative: coins, seal impressions and jar stamps bearing the provincial name, which establish the province’s existence and its Persian framework.
Related: the overviews of Nehemiah and Ezra, whose concerns Malachi shares.