Commenting on Arad Inscription 97 and its attestation of “Malachi” as a genuine proper name, Matt Bowen has the following helpful note in the essay “Messengers of the Covenant,” in Ancient Names in the Book of Mormon: Toward a Deeper Understanding of a Witness of Christ (Salt Lake City: Eborn Books; Orem, Utah: Interpreter Foundation, 2023), 368-69 n. 6:
Yohanan Aharoni (Arad
Inscriptions [Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society,
1981], 109) writes: “The engraving is crude and the form of most of the letters
is distorted. Thus it would seem that this inscription is incised by a man not
used to writing, as in several inscriptions from Beer-Sheba, and perhaps two
horizontal strokes are written in the wrong direction. We would therefore have
the name Malachi or perhaps Malachi[yahu]. This name appears in the Bible only
as the name of one of the prophets. Even though the reading is not entirely certain,
it supports the theory that Malachi is the name of the prophet and not his
title.” G.I. Davies (Ancient
Hebrew Inscriptions: Corpus and Concordance [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991)], 36, 423) also understands mlʾky in this inscription as a proper name. See also Joel S.
Burnett, “Divine Silence or Divine Absence? Converging Metaphors in Family
Religion in Ancient Israel and the Levant” in Reflections on the Silence of
God: A Discussion with Marjo Korpel and Joannes de Moor, ed. Bob Becking (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2013), 52.
Burnett cites Johannes Renz and Wolfgang Röllig, Handbuch
der althebräische Epigraphik, Band I: Die althebräischen Inschriften (Darmstadt, Germany: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft,
1995).
