Most Jewish and Christian traditions say the Book of Malachi was written by a prophet named Malachi , whose name in Hebrew means “my messenger.”

Traditional view

  • The heading of the book reads “The word of the Lord to Israel by Malachi,” which is taken as naming the prophet who authored it.
  • Many religious readers therefore treat Malachi as a historical prophet, active in the post‑exilic period (after the return from Babylon), around the mid‑5th century BCE.

Scholarly debates

  • Some scholars argue “Malachi” might be a title (“my messenger”) rather than a personal name, which would make the book effectively anonymous.
  • Others suggest, based on later Jewish tradition, that Ezra the scribe could have been the real author or redactor, though this view is not a majority position today.

What most scholars say now

  • Modern scholarship typically concludes that the final form of the book was composed by a single prophet figure known as Malachi, even if little to nothing is known about his life.
  • The book is dated roughly to 450–430 BCE, after the Second Temple was rebuilt and around the time of Ezra and Nehemiah, based on its references to temple worship and Persian‑period terminology.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.