Introduction to Haggai

The commentators introduce the book in much the same way, and this introduction follows them. What they say of the prophet, the times and the purpose of his preaching is drawn from Ezra and from the prophecy itself, and it is given here in their terms.

The prophet

Of Haggai himself Scripture says nothing beyond his name and his office. Poole and Gill take the name from the Hebrew word for a feast, “as if we should call him Festivus,” and both observe that the issue of his preaching answered to it: the temple was built, and its feasts restored. Gill thinks he was probably born in Babylon and came to Jerusalem young with the returning exiles. The notion that he was an angel in the form of a man, built on his title “the LORD’s messenger” (1:13), all of them dismiss: the word names his office, not his nature.

The times

Cyrus had sent the Jews home from Babylon to rebuild the house of God, and within a year of their return they set up the altar and laid the foundations of the temple (Ezra 3). Their enemies then obtained a prohibition from the Persian court, and the work stopped. When Haggai began to preach, in the second year of Darius Hystaspes (520 BC), the foundations had lain bare for some fifteen or sixteen years. Poole puts the stop down to “the covetousness of many, the coldness of some, and the cowardice of others,” and the English Annotations to their “regarding their private commodities, more than the public good.” Ezra records that Haggai and Zechariah prophesied to the Jews at Jerusalem, and that the builders “prospered through the prophesying of Haggai the prophet and Zechariah the son of Iddo” (Ezra 5:1; 6:14).

The prophecy

The book holds four dated messages, all within four months of one year, as the English Annotations reckon: the first day of the sixth month (1:1), the twenty-first day of the seventh (2:1), and twice on the twenty-fourth day of the ninth (2:10, 20). The first reproves the people for building their own houses while the LORD’s lay waste, and traces the drought and failed harvests of those years to that neglect; it was obeyed within twenty-four days (1:12–15). The second encourages those who wept at the poverty of the new house with the promise that its glory would be greater than Solomon’s. The third teaches by two questions of the law that a people unclean in heart makes unclean all its offerings, and promises a blessing from the day the building began. The last, to Zerubbabel alone, promises that when the LORD shakes the kingdoms he will make him as a signet.

The latter house

The commentators all read the promise of the second message of Christ. The “desire of all nations” is the Messiah, and the glory of the latter house greater than the former because he would come into it: presented there as a child, teaching and healing there, cleansing it. Henry and Gill draw the argument the older writers had pressed against the Jews, that since the Messiah was to come while the second temple stood, and that temple was long destroyed, he has come. Henry calls Haggai and Zechariah the prophets in whom “the light of that morning star shone more brightly than in the foregoing prophecies,” as they lived nearer the rising of the Sun of righteousness.