“Fox provides a fresh reading of Malachi by constantly looking for words, concepts, and images that may allude to a Persian background. It is an important task of the historical-critical enterprise to reconstruct the meaning of the metaphors in the time of the first addressees of the text. Further, it is certainly worth exploring what kind of associations an ancient reader in the Persian province of Yehud had when reading the text. Fox chooses to do so by taking the role of a messenger as the root metaphor.”—Aaron Schart Review of Biblical Literature