From this torpor they were roused by tidings which might well be interpreted as the restoration of divine favour. Away in the East Cyrus had been succeeded in 529 B.C. by Cambyses, who had annexed Egypt and on whose death in 522 a Magian impostor, Gaumata, had seized the throne. The fraud was short-lived, and Darius I. became king and the founder of a new dynasty. These events shook the whole Persian empire; Babylon and other subject states rose in revolt, and to the Jews it seemed that Persia was tottering and that the Messianic era was nigh. It was therefore natural that Haggai and Zechariah should urge the speedy building of the temple, in order that the great king might be fittingly received.
It is sometimes levied as a reproach against Haggai that he makes no direct reference to moral duties. But it is hardly fair to contrast his practical counsel with the more ethical and spiritual teaching of the earlier Hebrew prophets. One thing was needful—the temple. “Without a sanctuary Yahweh would have seemed a foreigner to Israel. The Jews would have thought that He had returned to Sinai, the holy mountain; and that they were deprived of the temporal blessings which were the gifts of a God who literally dwelt in the midst of his people.” Haggai argued that material prosperity was conditioned by zeal in worship; the prevailing distress was an indication of divine anger due to the people’s religious apathy. Haggai’s reproofs touched the conscience of the Jews, and the book of Zechariah enables us in some measure to follow the course of a religious revival which, starting with the restoration of the temple, did not confine itself to matters of ceremony and ritual worship. On the other hand, Haggai’s treatment of his theme, practical and effective as it was for the purpose in hand, moves on a far lower level than the aspirations of the prophet who wrote the closing chapters of Isaiah. To the latter the material temple is no more than a detail in the picture of a work of restoration eminently ideal and spiritual, and he expressly warns his hearers against attaching intrinsic importance to it (Isa. lxvi. 1). To Haggai the temple appears so essential that he teaches that while it lay waste, the people and all their works and offerings were unclean (Hag. ii. 14). In this he betrays his affinity with Ezekiel, who taught that it is by the possession of the sanctuary that Israel is sanctified (Ezek. xxxvii. 28). In truth the new movement of religious thought and feeling which started from the fall of the Hebrew state took two distinct lines, of which Ezekiel and the anonymous authors of Isa. xl.-lxvi. are the respective representatives. While the latter developed their great picture of Israel the mediatorial nation, the systematic and priestly mind of Ezekiel had shaped a more material conception of the religious vocation of Israel in that picture of the new theocracy where the temple and its ritual occupy the largest place, with a sanctity which is set in express contrast to the older conception of the holiness of the city of Jerusalem (cf. Ezek. xliii. 7 seq. with Jer. xxxi. 40, Isa. iv. 5), and with a supreme significance for the religious life of the people which is expressed in the figure of the living waters issuing from under the threshold of the house (Ezek. xlvii.). It was the conception of Ezekiel which permanently influenced the citizens of the new Jerusalem, and took final shape in the institutions of Ezra. To this consummation, with its necessary accompaniment in the extinction of prophecy, the book of Haggai already points.
Authorities.—The elaborate and valuable German commentary of A. Köhler (Erlangen, 1860) forms the first part of his work on the Nachexilische Propheten. Reinke’s Commentary (Münster, 1868) is the work of a scholarly Roman Catholic. Haggai has generally been treated in works on all the prophets, as by Ewald (2nd ed., 1868; Eng. trans., vol. iii., 1878); or along with the other minor prophets, as by Hitzig (3rd ed., by H. Steiner, Leipzig, 1881), Keil (1866, 3rd ed., 1888, Eng. trans., Edinburgh, 1868), and Pusey (1875), S. R. Driver (1906), W. Nowack (2nd ed., 1905), K. Marti (1904), J. Wellhausen (3rd ed., 1898); or with the other post-exile prophets, as by Köhler, Pressel (Gotha, 1870), Dods (1879) and others. The older literature will be found in books of introduction or in Rosenmüller’s Scholia. The learned commentary of Marckius may be specially mentioned. On the place of Haggai in the history of Old Testament prophecy, see Duhm, Theologie der Propheten (Bonn, 1875); A. B. Davidson, The Theology of the Old Testament (1904); A. F. Kirkpatrick, The Doctrine of the Prophets; G. A. Smith, The Book of the Twelve Prophets, vol. 2 (1903); Tony Andrée, Le Prophète Aggée; Ed. Meyer, Entstehung des Judentums (1896).
(W. R. S.; A. J. G.)
[1] In Bleek’s Einleitung, 4th ed., p. 434.
[2] See the note on Ps. cxlv. 1 in Field’s Hexapla; Köhler, Weissagungen Haggai’s, 32; Wright, Zechariah and his Prophecies, xix.
[3] After the foundation of the temple Zerubbabel disappears from history and lives only in legend, which continued to busy itself with his story, as we see from the apocryphal book of Esdras (cf. Derenbourg, Hist. de la Palestine, chap. i).
[4] G. A. Smith, Minor Prophets, ii. 235.