[877] Or anger to bear, Heb. rest.
[878] The collective name for the Jews in exile.
[879] LXX. παρὰ τῶν ἀρχόντων, מִחֹרִים; but since an accusative is wanted to express the articles taken, Hitzig proposes to read מַחֲמַדַּי, My precious things. The LXX. reads the other two names καὶ παρὰ τῶν χρησίμων αὐτῆς καὶ παρὰ τῶν ἐπεγνωκότων αὐτήν.
[880] The construction of ver. 10 is very clumsy; above it is rendered literally. Wellhausen proposes to delete and do thou go ... to the house of, and take Yosiyahu’s name as simply a fourth with the others, reading the last clause who have come from Babylon. This is to cut, not disentangle, the knot.
[881] The Hebrew text here has Joshua son of Jehosadak, the high priest, but there is good reason to suppose that the crown was meant for Zerubbabel, but that the name of Joshua was inserted instead in a later age, when the high priest was also the king—see below, note. For these reasons Ewald had previously supposed that the whole verse was genuine, but that there had fallen out of it the words and on the head of Zerubbabel. Ewald found a proof of this in the plural form עטרות, which he rendered crowns. (So also Wildeboer, A. T. Litteratur, p. 297.) But עטרות is to be rendered crown; see ver. 11, where it is followed by a singular verb. The plural form refers to the several circlets of which it was woven.
[882] Some critics omit the repetition.
[883] So Wellhausen proposes to insert. The name was at least understood in the original text.
[884] So LXX. Heb. on his throne.
[885] With this phrase, vouched for by both the Heb. and the Sept., the rest of the received text cannot be harmonised. There were two: one is the priest just mentioned who is to be at the right hand of the crowned. The received text makes this crowned one to be the high priest Joshua. But if there are two and the priest is only secondary, the crowned one must be Zerubbabel, whom Haggai has already designated as Messiah. Nor is it difficult to see why, in a later age, when the high priest was sovereign in Israel, Joshua’s name should have been inserted in place of Zerubbabel’s, and at the same time the phrase priest at his right hand, to which the LXX. testifies in harmony with the two of them, should have been altered to the reading of the received text, priest upon his throne. With the above agree Smend, A. T. Rel. Gesch., 343 n., and Nowack.
[886] Heb. חֵלֶם, Hēlem, but the reading Heldai, חלדי, is proved by the previous occurrence of the name and by the LXX. reading here, τοῖς ὑπομένουσιν, i.e. from root חלד, to last.