The Lessons of Jesus

Old Testament · Part Five: The Twelve · Chapter 37

Haggai: The Temple I Walked In

The Temple Haggai begged them to build was the Temple I taught in.

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At a Glance

Who wrote it: Haggai the prophet, or an editor who recorded his words with exact dates.

When: Four messages, all in 520 BC, over less than four months, in the second year of the Persian king Darius I.

Where it fits: After the exile. Haggai spoke in Jerusalem about eighteen years after the first exiles came home from Babylon, the years told in Ezra 1 to 6. Ezra names him (Ezra 5:1; 6:14). The Temple was finished in 515 BC.

Where I quote it: Never. But the governor it names, Zerubbabel, appears in both of my family trees (Matthew 1:12–13; Luke 3:27).

If you only read three chapters: It has two. Read both.

Words to Know

Zerubbabel — the governor of Judah under Persia, a grandson of King Jehoiachin, from David’s line.

Joshua the high priest — the chief priest at the time. In Hebrew, his name is the same as mine.

Signet — a king’s seal ring, pressed into wax to make a document official. A sign of authority.

The Book in Brief

Haggai is a short book of prophecy in two chapters. It holds four messages, each dated to the day in the second year of the Persian king Darius. Haggai speaks to Zerubbabel the governor, to Joshua the high priest and to the people who have come back from exile to Jerusalem. The book tells nothing about his life except that he was a prophet.

In chapter 1, Haggai tells them that their harvests fail and their wages vanish because they live in their own houses while God’s house lies in ruins. The leaders and the people obey, and about three weeks later they begin work on the Temple.

Chapter 2 holds the other three messages. To those who remember the old Temple and find the new one poor, God promises to shake the nations and fill this house with a glory greater than before. Next Haggai asks the priests two questions about what is holy and what is unclean, and promises that from that day God will bless the harvest. The last message is for Zerubbabel alone. God will overthrow the thrones of kingdoms and make him like a signet ring.

Haggai is a short, practical book. The exiles had come home from Babylon almost twenty years earlier, laid the Temple’s foundation and then stopped. Times were hard. People were busy rebuilding their own lives.

Haggai asks them a question: Is it a time for you yourselves to dwell in your paneled houses, while this house lies waste? (Haggai 1:4).

A bag with holes

Then he describes their economy, and it may sound familiar:

You have sown much, and bring in little. You eat, but you don’t have enough. You drink, but you aren’t filled with drink. You clothe yourselves, but no one is warm, and he who earns wages earns wages to put them into a bag with holes in it (Haggai 1:6).

A bag with holes. You work and work, and the money disappears before you can use it.

Haggai’s answer is that they had their priorities wrong. They were looking after their own houses and neglecting what they shared. The people listen, and they start building.

The old men’s tears

When the new Temple begins to rise, it is small and plain. Haggai asks the old people a painful question: Who is left among you who saw this house in its former glory? How do you see it now? Isn’t it in your eyes as nothing? (Haggai 2:3). When its foundation was laid, Ezra remembers, the old men who had seen the first Temple wept aloud (Ezra 3:12).

Then he promises: The latter glory of this house will be greater than the former (Haggai 2:9).

The signet ring

Haggai’s last message is to Zerubbabel, the governor, who was a grandson of King Jehoiachin, the king of David’s line who was carried off to Babylon.

Jeremiah had said of Jehoiachin that even if he were the signet on my right hand, God would tear him off (Jeremiah 22:24). Haggai reverses it for the grandson: I will take you, Zerubbabel, my servant … and will make you as a signet, for I have chosen you (Haggai 2:23).

Haggai hoped that David’s line was about to rule again. Then Zerubbabel disappears from history. We do not know what happened to him. The hope moved on to someone else.1

Both Matthew and Luke include Zerubbabel in my family tree, though the two lists meet only at Zerubbabel and his father Shealtiel, and go completely different ways before and after them.

Go deeperThe year the Persian empire shook

Haggai dates every message to the day, by the reign of a Persian king: in the second year of Darius the king (Haggai 1:1). Scholars can match his dates to our calendar. His four messages fall between late August and December 520 BC.2

That Darius was Darius I, and he had not been king long. When King Cambyses died in 522 BC, the throne was held by a man who claimed to be Cambyses’ brother. Darius and a handful of nobles killed him, and Darius made himself king. Then the empire exploded. Babylon, Media, Elam, Armenia and other lands rose in revolt, some of them more than once.

Darius told his side of the story on a cliff at Behistun, in western Iran, high above the road, in three languages. Beside the words is a carving of Darius with his foot on the pretender, and the rebel kings roped together by the neck in front of him. He says that in one year he fought nineteen battles and captured nine kings. Copies went out across the empire. Part of one, in Aramaic, was found on papyrus at Elephantine, an island in the Nile in southern Egypt.3

By the time Haggai spoke, Darius had won. But the memory was fresh. When Haggai told Zerubbabel that God would overthrow the throne of kingdoms (Haggai 2:22), his hearers had just seen thrones fall all over the world they knew. Many scholars think that is part of why he hoped David’s line was about to rise again. Others point out that the revolts were over, and that Haggai is speaking of what God will do, not of what was happening that year.

The Temple I knew

The Temple Haggai urged them to build was finished around 515 BC. It was small.

Five hundred years later, King Herod rebuilt and enlarged it on a scale the ancient world talked about, with huge white stones and gold. When I was in Jerusalem, it was still being worked on. Someone told me, It took forty-six years to build this temple! (John 2:20).4

As we walked out of it one day, one of my friends said, Teacher, see what kind of stones and what kind of buildings!

I told him, Do you see these great buildings? There will not be left here one stone on another, which will not be thrown down (Mark 13:1–2).

In the year 70, the Romans burned it. Haggai’s Temple, made splendid by Herod, lasted about five hundred and eighty years.

Haggai was right that the people should not neglect the house of God for their own houses. I loved that Temple. I called it my Father’s house. But I also knew that God’s presence was never something a building could hold.

Go deeperWhat is left of the Temple I walked in

Nothing of the Temple building itself has ever been found. The Romans burned it, and later builders covered the site. What survives is the enormous platform Herod built around it, the hill now called the Temple Mount. Its western retaining wall, the part my people call the Western Wall, still shows Herod’s great stones, each with a flat, finely cut border around its face.

Some smaller finds speak more directly. In 1871 a French scholar, Charles Clermont-Ganneau, found a stone block in Jerusalem carved with a warning in Greek. No foreigner, it says, may go beyond the barrier around the Temple, and anyone who is caught will have himself to blame for the death that follows. A broken second copy was found in 1935. The Jewish historian Josephus, who saw the Temple standing, describes these notices set along the barrier.5 Acts says a crowd nearly killed my follower Paul because they thought he had taken a Greek past that line (Acts 21:27–31).

In the excavations that began in 1968 at the southwest corner of the platform, archaeologists found a stone that had fallen from the top of the wall. Its Hebrew inscription reads to the place of trumpeting. Josephus says that a priest stood up there to blow a trumpet at the start and end of each Sabbath.6

And along the foot of the western wall, archaeologists cleared the paved street of my day. They found it smashed and buried under huge blocks thrown down from the walls above when the Romans destroyed the city in AD 70. The stones have been left where they fell, and you can walk beside them today.7

Check It Yourself

Look up: Haggai 1:3–6.

You will find: wages put into a bag with holes.

Then read Haggai 2:3, then Mark 13:1–2. The same Temple, five centuries apart.

The Short Version

  • Haggai urged the returned exiles to rebuild the Temple in 520 BC, while they were busy with their own houses.
  • He described wages that went into a bag with holes.
  • The new Temple was small, and the old people wept (Ezra 3:12).
  • He hoped Zerubbabel, of David’s line, would rule. Zerubbabel vanished from history, but he is in my family tree.
  • Herod rebuilt that Temple on a grand scale. I said not one stone would be left, and in AD 70 the Romans destroyed it.

Sources for this chapter

Every numbered note in the text points here, so nothing has to be taken on trust.

  1. Zerubbabel is last named in Ezra 5:2 and is absent from the account of the Temple’s completion and dedication (Ezra 6:13–22). Some scholars think the Persians removed him because of hopes like Haggai’s; there is no evidence either way. ↩
  2. Haggai 1:1, 15; 2:1, 10, 20. On the conversion of these dates from the Babylonian calendar, see Carol L. Meyers and Eric M. Meyers, Haggai, Zechariah 1–8 (Anchor Bible, 1987). ↩
  3. Darius I, the Behistun inscription, in Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian. It tells of Gaumata, who claimed to be Cambyses’ brother Bardiya, and of the revolts of 522–521 BC, and claims nineteen battles and nine captured kings in a single year. Fragments of an Aramaic version on papyrus were found at Elephantine. Herodotus, Histories 3.61–88, tells another version of Darius’s rise. ↩
  4. John 2:20. Josephus dates the start of Herod’s rebuilding to the eighteenth year of his reign, about 20–19 BC (Antiquities 15.380), and says work on the whole complex was completed only in AD 63–64, a few years before it was destroyed (Antiquities 20.219). ↩
  5. The complete warning inscription, found by Charles Clermont-Ganneau in 1871, is in the Istanbul Archaeology Museums; the fragmentary copy found in 1935 is in the Israel Museum. Josephus, Jewish War 5.193–194; Antiquities 15.417. ↩
  6. The “place of trumpeting” inscription, found in Benjamin Mazar’s excavations at the southwest corner of the Temple Mount, is in the Israel Museum. Josephus, Jewish War 4.582, describes the priest’s trumpet signal at the beginning and end of the Sabbath. ↩
  7. The excavations along the southern and western walls of the Temple Mount, begun by Benjamin Mazar in 1968 and continued by later teams, exposed the Herodian street with the stones that fell on it in AD 70. They are shown in the Jerusalem Archaeological Park. ↩