Mal 4:2 (Heb: 3:20) in the KJV reads:
But
unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in
his wings; and ye shall go forth, and grow up as calves of the stall.
The Hebrew literally reads “healing in her wings,” as “sun” (שֶׁ֣מֶשׁ) and “wing” (כָּנָף) in Hebrew are grammatically feminine. However (and this is lost on a lot of people, including a few LDS) sexual gender and grammatical gender are not one-to-one equivalent to one another. Indeed, scholars believe that YHWH is in view here, and “his” is a correct interpretation of this verse.
In his 2022 essay, “Iconography
on Hebrew Seals and Bullae Identifying Biblical Persons and the Apparent
Paradox of Egyptian Solar Symbols,” Stanhope notes that YHWH (and, in related
literature, other male deities such as El and Marduk) have solar imagery
applied to them, including Mal 4:2:
1.
Biblical Evidence. In the case of the first, evidence for a solarized
Yahweh in the Iron Age is now widely recognized by scholars, and I briefly
belabor it here since it must be held in mind when considering all of the
remaining artifacts to be examined in this study. The Isaiah tradition unambiguously
figures Yahweh as the luminous ‘breaking’ and ‘rising’ ‘dawn’ in Isa. 58.8 and
60.1. In 60.19, it is even said that Yahweh’s glory will eternally replace the
sun in the New Creation. Deuteronomy 33.2 likewise speaks of Yahweh ‘dawning
from Seir . . . shining forth from Mount Paran’. Psalm 84.11 figures Yahweh as
a ‘sun and shield’ and ‘would seem to constitute a description in accordance
with the divine presence in the Jerusalem temple’.
Malachi
3.20 (Eng. 4.2), contains language that conceptually interfaces with Isa. 58.8,
and refers to Yahweh as a sun with healing in his wings ‘שׁמשׁ צדקה ומרפא בכנפיה’. In his rebuttal to Cross, Lubetski reasonably
opposed the use of Malachi to contextualize the theology of Hezekiah’s period.
However, an interesting recent study by Whitely proposed on the basis of Phoenician
parallels that Amos 4.13 uses the term עיפה to refer to the winged sun as well,
indicating that an ‘interpretatio Hebraica’ of the icon may span across
these earlier centuries. Additionally, Smith has even argued on the basis of
parallels between Genesis 1 and Psalm 104 that Yahweh produced the sunlight
that marked the first few days of creation before the sun was created on the
fourth creation day, and some Egyptologists have adopted this position.
As
several final pieces of evidence, one may note biblical and inscription
documentation for solar theophoric personal names of this period like Yhwzrḥ
(‘Yahwh has risen’), or Nryhw (‘light of Yahweh’), and it seems quite likely
that this indigenous, and originally orthodox, association of Yahweh with the
sun contributed to the solar worship scandals at the Temple reported in Ezek.
8.16 and 2 Kgs 23.11.
2.
Evidence from the Broader Near East. Second, overwhelmingly, the broader
context of the ancient Near East attests that co-opting the sun disk to
represent a local chief deity was culturally normative. Seever and Korhonen
cite the cultic adoption of the symbol as far abroad as Hatti, Persia, and the
Mesopotamian cradle, where the winged sun disk and explicitly solarizing language
were applied to the Babylonian deity Marduk, the gods Shamash, Asshur of Assyria,
and the Persian god Ahura Mazda. Smith likewise observes the use of the sun
disk as a deity symbol on an Ugaritic Stele depicting El. One may add to this
the Syrian examples identified by Ornan, or the wide Phoenician attestation of
the motif as a representation of Ba’al recognized by Culican. It seems likely
that the Bible participates in this tradition since, following general Near
Eastern convention, its authors from all periods frequently borrow titles,
hymns, and mythic features of foreign deities and attribute them to Yahweh,
often as an orthodox strategy of elevating the God of Israel above his
competitors. (Benjamin Stanhope, “Iconography on Hebrew Seals and Bullae
Identifying Biblical Persons and the Apparent Paradox of Egyptian Solar Symbols,”
in Epigraphy, Iconography, and the Bible, ed. Meir Lubetski and Edith
Lubetski [Hebrew Bible Monographs 98; Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2022],
187-89, emphasis in bold added)
