Malachi 2:7-9 - Joseph Benson’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

For the priest's lips should keep knowledge Preserve and store up, so as to distribute it. It is his duty to understand the meaning of the law of God: and people ought to resort to him for instruction in any difficulty that arises concerning the sense of it. For he is the messenger of the Lord of hosts He is appointed to declare God's will unto the people, and to enforce upon them obedience to it. But ye are departed out of the way Ye act in a quite different manner from that which was the original design of your office, and which those observed who were first instituted into it. Ye have caused many to stumble at the law You have either perverted the sense of the law, or encouraged others to break it by your bad example; ye have corrupted the covenant of Levi By your evil practices you have broken or rendered void that covenant: by your not performing that part of the covenant which the tribe of Levi was bound to perform, you have disengaged me from performing my part, or fulfilling those promises which I had engaged to make good to them on the performance of certain conditions on their side. Therefore have I also made Or rather, will make, (a future event being evidently foretold,) you contemptible and base The indignities which the priests were to receive in the times of Antiochus, seem to be here intended. According as ye have not kept my ways Have not been careful to walk in them. But have been partial in the law Or, accepted faces, or persons, in the law, as the Hebrew signifies, that is, have wrested the sense of the law in favour, or to please great men, or to serve some unworthy design of particular persons. When we inquire into “the reasons of the contempt of the clergy,” ought we to forget this?