What precedes the dreadful day?

The heading announces wicked judgment, just reward, observance of law and Elias’s coming for Jewish conversion. A coming furnace-like day burns proud and wicked people as stubble without root or branch. For those fearing God’s name the Sun of justice rises with health in his wings; they go forth and leap like calves of the herd. The wicked become ashes under their feet on that day. These images are retained without changing the calves into animals released from stalls or adding a clinical healing mechanism.

Israel must remember Moses’s law commanded at Horeb, with precepts and judgments. Elias is promised before the great and dreadful day to turn fathers’ hearts to children and children’s to fathers, lest earth be struck with anathema. The edition explains reconciliation of Jews to patriarchs and prophets through faith in Christ, attributing their estrangement to refusal to believe. It explains Hebrew Cherem as utter destruction. These are the edition’s interpretations; the chapter does not announce a canon-ending interval of silence.