Bible Commentaries

CHAP. II.

He encourageth the people to the work, by a promise of greater glory to the second temple, than was in the first. In the type of holy things and unclean, he sheweth that their sins hindered the work. God's promise to Zerubbabel.

Before Christ 520.

Haggai 2:3. Who is left among you, &c.— See the note on Ezra 3:12. The foundation of this house was laid in the second year of Cyrus; the second year of Cyrus was fifty-three years after the destruction of the first temple; so that the oldest men among those who returned might very well remember it; and though this prophesy was uttered fifteen years after the foundation of the second temple, yet there might still survive some of those who had seen the structure built by Solomon. See Lowth. The latter clause of this verse should be rendered, Doth not this appear as nothing in comparison of it; that is to say, of the first temple?

Haggai 2:5. According to the word that I covenanted— Houbigant begins this verse with the last clause of the fourth, For I, saith the Lord of Hosts, will bring to you that which I covenanted with you, when ye came out of Egypt; and my Spirit shall remain with you: fear ye not. What was that covenant? says Bishop Warburton;—that Israel should be his people, and he be their God and king. Therefore, it cannot mean barely that he would be their God, and they should be his people; for this was but part of the covenant; nor can it mean that they should be conducted by an extraordinary providence as at their coming out of Egypt, and during the first periods of the theocracy; for this was but the effect of the covenant; and besides, we know that that dispensation and providence soon ceased after the re-establishment. The meaning therefore must be, that he would still continue their king as well as God; yet at the same time, when this theocracy was restored, it was both fit, on account of its dignity, and necessary for the people's assurance, that it should be attended with some unusual display of the divine favour: accordingly, prophets were raised up, and an extraordinary providence for some time administered, as appears from many places in these prophets. See Haggai, Haggai 1:6; Haggai 1:11; Haggai 2:16; Haggai 2:19. Zechariah 8:12. Malachi 3:10-11 and Div. Leg. book 5: sect. 3.

Haggai 2:6-9. For thus saith the Lord— The excellent Bishop Chandler has, with his usual learning and judgment, explained this remarkable prophesy; and it is from him that we have chiefly extracted what follows. The occasion of this prophesy, says he, was the dejection of the Jews at the unhopeful appearance of their new-erecting temple, Haggai 2:3. The comfort, therefore, in the prophet's message was surely suited to this circumstance, and contains a promise of some glory to be conferred on this temple, to make it exceed the glory of the former. Wherein the glory of the first temple consisted, is not said; but it sufficiently appears from the nature of their complaint, and from the eighth verse, that they considered it to have consisted in magnificence of structure, and richness of ornaments. These God makes no account of; the silver is mine, and the gold, &c. which is a manner of speaking not unfrequent in Scripture, to signify, that he hath no pleasure in such things. The glory that he intends for this latter house, is of another nature. It shall consist in the presence of Him, who is described as the desire of all nations, Haggai 2:7 and as peace, Haggai 2:9.—and, or for in this place will I give peace. This glory they were not to expect immediately; great revolutions must first happen in the world; Haggai 2:6. After one [kingdom] it is a little while; and [or after that] I will shake the heavens, &c. and the desire [or expectation] of all nations shall come; namely, into this house; which shall be the filling—the completion of its glory. Thus the Hebrew should be Englished; and thus a date of time is fixed for the performance of the promise.

The Persian kingdom under which they lived was now subsisting; and, after one other kingdom, which should succeed that in dominion over them, it should be but a little while before God would shake the heavens, &c. that is, the whole Gentile world, or empire, to make way for the coming-in of the desire of all nations. Great changes in the political world are commonly foretold in Scripture under the figure of earthquakes; such were the commotions in the Roman empire from the death of Julius Caesar to the birth of Christ, which wasted all the provinces of the nation, and ended in a change of the Roman government, great enough to answer the description of it in Haggai.

For the farther clearing of the prophesy it should be shewn, first, that the desire of all nations is spoken of a person desired, not of things desirable, as some of the Jews understand it; secondly, that this person is the Messiah; and thirdly, that this person was to come under the temple that they were then building.

I. As to the first, we may observe, that if things, and not a person was meant, the expression shall come is absurd; for things cannot be said to come,—which is a personal action, but to be brought. The application of the words to a person is natural and easy. The presence of one of high dignity gives honour and glory to the meanest cottage. It was the symbol of God's presence in Solomon's temple that was truly its glory; and it is the restoring of this glory in the days of the Messiah, which, in the judgment of many Jews, is to make out the glory of another temple. Whomsoever God shall visibly manifest himself upon, may in some sense be called the glory of God; and should he do this most gloriously in the person of the Messiah, the Jews would own that his presence in the temple would be the glory of it, if you would grant, at the same time, that he was not yet come: but come, or not come, makes no alteration in the case. He that would be the glory of the third temple, by coming to it, was so to the second temple, if he honoured it with his presence. The words, then, do well bear the sense of person; which moreover agrees perfectly with the context. "Be ye not troubled (says the prophet) that this house is in your eyes as nothing in comparison of the former. All its deficiencies shall be compensated hereafter, by His coming to it, whom your fathers desired to see, and did not see, under Solomon's temple; and who shall therefore make this temple far more illustrious than that." And thus the prophet himself seems to interpret his meaning; for, repeating the same political concussion, Haggai 2:21-22. I will shake the heavens, &c. he tells them, that this was in order to make room for one, under the name of Zerubbabel, whom God would take, and make as a signet, or exalt to most high dignity, power, and trust, of which the seal was the instrument or sign in those days. Where the same revolution is spoken of, the same person was probably intended; the one passage is parallel to the other. So again, should the word peace, Haggai 2:9 which God promises to give in this place, be understood of external peace and felicity, it will be hard to say how this was fulfilled, or could give the preference of the latter house to the former: for all the time under the second temple was troublesome and unquiet; far short of the halcyon days which they had enjoyed under Solomon: but, take it figuratively for a person, who publishes glad tidings of peace and salvation, whose doctrine and example tended to an universal peace throughout the world, and was always followed with internal and everlasting peace to those who obeyed him,—and there is no comparison between the two temples; no more than between the outward tranquillity of a short reign, and the peace of God which exceeds all that we can desire.

II. Who this person should be, is the second consideration: and he may easily be known by the application of the same, or synonymous epithets, in other prophets. From Abraham's days a seed was promised, in whom all the nations of the earth should be blessed. The promise was renewed to Isaac, afterwards to Jacob, who restricted it to one of Judah's posterity, to Shiloh, who was foretold to be the gathering of the people, or, as the Hebrew word is rendered by the ancient versions and Jewish commentators, the expectation of the people. When God confined it to one family, of the tribe of Judah, to David's seed, David foretels of him by the Spirit, that men, that all the families of the earth, as the Greek interpreters read, shall be blessed in him; all nations shall call him blessed. This was not Solomon; for of the same rod of Jesse Isaiah prophesied, chap. Isaiah 11:10 that to him shall the Gentiles seek; or, as the LXX, in him shall they hope—and his peace shall be glorious: and again, where our translation hath it, the isles shall wait for his law, meaning the Messiah, ch. Isaiah 42:4 it is in the Greek, In his name shall the Gentiles hope. And as to Israel, it is implied that he was once their desire, till he appeared without the pomp and splendour of a prince, which they expected from him; and then they saw no beauty, that they should desire him, Isaiah 53:2. Hence it appears, that the expectation, the hope, the desire of all nations, and of Israel in particular, was a known description of some person, delivered from one prophet to another, and which, after the captivity, was fixed on the Messiah. Compare the present passage with Malachi 3:1 in which the quality of the persons, and the place, so exactly agree, that one must think with R. Aben Ezra, that the same person is meant by both prophets; who is no other than the Lord Messiah, who in the days of Jesus Christ was usually termed, the hope—the blessed hope—the hope of Israel—the hope of the promise of the twelve tribes—the blessing of Abraham to the Gentiles, &c. 1 Timothy 1:1; Titus 2:13. Acts 28:20; Acts 26:7-8. Galatians 3:14. Accordingly, the Jews about Christ's time interpret this text in Haggai of the Messiah. Akiba, who might be born under the second temple, and was chief rabbi and counsellor to Barcochba in Trajan's reign, understands it so; as does the Targum on Isaiah 4:2. Not to search after more authorities, we may acquiesce in the confession of Jarchi, who asserts that the ancients expounded this place of the Messiah. The other word peace is also a name of the Messiah; and as it includes in the notion thereof all kinds of happiness, it seems to be the reason why he is the desire of all nations; even because he shall be the blessing of all nations. However that be, this is one among the other lofty titles of the Messiah in Isaiah 9:6. Prince, Peace, as the words may be rendered in apposition. Of the governor that should come forth out of Bethlehem, it is said, Micah 5:2-5 that he should be the peace; and the Jew's own paraphrase hereof is, The Messiah shall be our peace. Under this title the Jews pray for him in their liturgy, when they say, "Cause to come unto us, blessing and peace quickly.—Give peace, good, blessing, &c. to us and thy people, &c." Add to this, that the Messiah is spoken of in other places of Scripture by the name of the glory of the Lord,

Isaiah 40:5; Isaiah 60:1-2 and then nothing is wanting to prove, that the person whose coming shall make the latter house glorious must be the Messiah.

III. This interpretation is farther strengthened, thirdly, from the expectation that the Jews generally had of the Messiah's coming before the end of the second temple, into which the person prophesied of by Haggai, was to come. To this purpose are several of their traditions: "The second temple shall continue to the age to come, and the days of the Messiah." And, "on the day the temple was destroyed, the Messiah was born:" And to guard against the argument which may be formed against them from this concession, they have invented an idle story, that the Messiah was indeed born under the second temple; but is hidden at Rome, till God shall permit him to reveal himself. Very remarkable is the saying of Rabbi Jose, who lived at the destruction of the temple by Titus, and, grieving at the sight thereof, exclaimed, "Alas! the time of the Messiah is past."

They never dreamed then of a third temple; much less did they infer it from Haggai, who says directly the contrary. Haggai's temple is plainly the same that they then saw, and which was in their eyes as nothing; for he adds, for their comfort, I will fill this house with glory—this latter house—-this place, with peace. There had been at that time but two houses: Solomon's, which was the former, was no longer in being: Zerubbabel's, which is the latter, was now building, unlike to the former in magnificence, and yet promised to exceed it in glory. Nothing can be plainer than that into this house the desire of all nations was to come; that while this temple was standing he was to appear in this place, and manifest forth his glory. Within this compass of time none else came, whom these titles fitted, besides Jesus Christ, in whom the Logos, or Word, tabernacled, or placed his Shechinah, and whose glory they beheld, as of the only begotten of the Father. John 1:14. See Bishop Chandler's Defence, p. 71, &c. The reader will also find in Dr. Sharpe's Sermon on the Rise and Fall of Jerusalem, p. 36 some good remarks on the subject.

Haggai 2:10-14. In the four-and-twentieth day, &c.— Three months after they had begun to build the temple, Haggai receives orders from the Lord, to go and propose two questions to the priests, respecting the ceremonies of the law; in order from their answer to draw instruction for the princes and the people. He first asks, whether the sanctified flesh of a sacrifice which a man carried in the lappet of his garment, communicated its sanctity, and rendered the things which he approached and touched with it incapable of being indifferently employed. The priests answer in the negative; upon which the prophet asks again, Haggai 2:14 whether a man, who is polluted by having attended a funeral, if he touches any thing eatable, does not communicate his pollution, so as that those who are clean can no longer use it. The priests reply, that the man thus polluted renders whatever he uses or touches unclean: the prophet then in the next verse, in the name of Jehovah, applies this their last answer to the present state of the people: "As a man polluted communicates his pollution to whatever he touches; so, whatever you have hitherto done, and whatever you have offered to me in this temple, hath been polluted in my sight. In vain have you offered to me sacrifices, to avert my anger from your land, and engage me to restore its fertility; I have been deaf to your vows, I have turned away mine eyes from your oblations. You have been smitten with the scourge of my displeasure until now; but inasmuch as you have at length begun to set about my temple, you shall soon behold the effects of my blessings upon you. I will restore fruitfulness to your fields, your vineyards and your olive-trees." See Haggai 2:19. God, to adapt himself to the grossness of the people, and render them more sensible of the fault that they had committed in thus neglecting the re-establishment of his house, observes, that he hitherto considered them all as men defiled by the touch of a dead body, since, instead of exciting his mercy by their offerings, they had only communicated their pollutions to the temple, altar, and victims. See Calmet.

Haggai 2:16. Since those days, &c.— The prophet is here speaking of the dearth and famine consequent upon their neglect of building the temple. The present verse is very elliptical; if the first clause were to be explained by the second, which it reasonably may, it should be rendered, When one came to an heap for twenty measures; that is to say, when a person came to a heap of corn, to draw out twenty measures from it, it was found so deficient, as to supply only ten. Such also was the case with respect to those who came to draw out fifty measures of wine from the wine-press. Dr. Gill explains it, "When the husbandman, having gathered in his corn, who is generally a good judge of what it would yield, came to a heap of it on his corn floor, either of sheaves unthreshed, or of corn unwinnowed, and expected that it would have produced at least twenty measures, after it was threshed and winnowed; to his great disappointment he had but ten out of it."

Haggai 2:18. Upward— Forward.

Haggai 2:19. Yea, as yet the vine, &c.— Have the vine, &c. yet brought forth nothing. Houbigant. From this day have I blessed you. The prophet makes a comparison between the dearth which preceded the building of the temple, and the fertility following, while the temple was building; and if there were not a present fertility, and already begun, there could be no place left for a comparison.

Haggai 2:21. Speak to Zerubbabel, &c.— See this passage explained in the note on Haggai 2:6, &c.

REFLECTIONS.—1st, Having set themselves heartily to their work, God encourages them by a second message, about a month after the former, to proceed in the building. Some, probably who had seen the former temple, which had been destroyed about seventy years, beheld with grief the present structure, so little comparable to that for magnificence; and perhaps discouraged the hearts of the builders, suggesting what an insignificant house this would be; but God bid the prophet say, Be strong, O Zerubbabel and Joshua, and all ye people of the land, and work, nor be disheartened at any obstacles. And he suggests, for this purpose, the most reviving grounds of encouragement.

1. God will be with them with his special presence, and the comforts of his Spirit, according to his covenant when he brought them out of Egypt, and took them for a peculiar nation to preserve his name: therefore they need not fear, success should crown their labours. The Spirit of Jehovah, the Spirit of wisdom and might, should be their guide, their stay and consolation; and if he be with us, then shall we be strong.

2. In this temple shall the Messiah incarnate appear, and give it far greater glory than ever Solomon's temple could boast of: Yet once, it is a little while before this shall come to pass; for though the coming of Christ was distant five hundred years, it was a little while in God's sight, or compared with the time since the first promise had been given; and yet once may have reference to God's appearance on Sinai, when he revealed himself in such tremendous majesty, shaking the heavens and the earth, as now should again be done. Before the coming of Christ, the nations and all their rulers had been shaken in pieces as by an earthquake, through the prevalence of the Roman arms; and when Christ appeared, his Gospel made a shaking among the nations, awakening the consciences of men, and changing their natures; destroying and silencing the oracles of the heathen, and abolishing all the ceremonial institutions, Hebrews 12:27. And the desire of all nations shall come; He, whose salvation is to extend to all nations, the desirable object which every miserable sinner so greatly needs, and whom all should long for as their only hope and refuge; and I will fill this house with glory, saith the Lord, by the presence of the incarnate Jehovah, which should far exceed in glory the Shechinah of old. It is true they might say, that their treasures were utterly insufficient to adorn the temple, as it had been overlaid by Solomon with gold; but God anticipates the objection. The silver is mine, and the gold is mine, these were his own before Solomon bestowed them on his building; and he could, if he had pleased, have given them enough to have done so likewise; but his glory was not by these exalted. Far greater should be the glory of this latter house than of the former; though neither ark, nor shechinah, nor urim and thummim, nor celestial fire was there; the fulness of the Godhead bodily resident in Jesus should far surpass all these; and the miracles that he wrought, and the Gospel that he declared, exalted the latter house far above the former: and in this place will I give peace, saith the Lord of Hosts; not temporal peace, for under the second temple the Jews enjoyed little of that, but spiritual peace, which Jesus the Prince of Peace came to purchase, preach, and communicate to all his believing people.

2nd, The discourse contained in the 10th and following verses is designed,

1. To humble them under a sense of their pollution and sinfulness; and in order hereunto the prophet is sent to inquire of the priests, not so much for his information, as their conviction. He puts two questions to them concerning the law, of which they were the expounders, [1.] Whether a person carrying holy flesh in his garment, sanctified by the touch of it any common meat? to which they answered, No; for though the garment must be washed before it could be employed in common uses, Leviticus 6:27 yet it communicated no virtue to what it touched. [2.] Whether, if a person unclean touched any of these, it should be unclean? they said, It shall be unclean, Numbers 19:22 so much more easily is pollution communicated than purity. Then answered Haggai, applying the case to the priests and people, So is this nation before me, saith the Lord; their ritual devotions and services, like the garment carrying holy flesh, could not sanctify; while their hearts being unclean, every thing they touched received defilement; and especially, as seems to be the intention of the prophet to shew, was this the case with them while they neglected the building of God's house; and this they are called upon to consider, and lay to heart, that, in their reflections on the past, they might lie low before God, from this day and upward, from before a stone was laid upon a stone in the temple of the Lord; from that day, when they left off the work about seventeen years before, they had been under the constant marks of God's displeasure, the sure proof of their sins. Their harvest had failed their expectations; the heap of corn which should have yielded twenty measures, when it came to be threshed gave but ten; and when from the quantity of grapes that he put into the press, the vine-dresser hoped to draw out fifty measures, there were but twenty. Blasting, mildew, and hail, destroyed the fruits of the earth; yet ye turned not to me, saith the Lord, continued unhumbled under those providences, and resumed not the work of the sanctuary: all which they should remember, and humble their souls before the Lord.

2. To encourage them, he bids them observe, from the day forward that they began to turn to God, and set themselves heartily to his neglected service, what a blessed alteration would appear. Is the seed yet in the barn? No: they had just sown it, and it was not yet come up, and uncertain what harvest it would produce; their fruit-trees, it being winter, were now bare; but, saith God, from this day will I bless you with plenty of all good things, and to their full conviction demonstrate how much they consulted even their own advantage in returning to his work and service. Note; They who faithfully apply themselves to God's work shall assuredly find his blessing, sometimes in providential gifts of this world's goods, but always in the comfort that he will bestow upon their souls.

3rdly, The same day in which Haggai had delivered the above mentioned message to the people in general, he is sent to Zerubbabel in particular, with encouragement to him under the difficulties of his office, and the dangers to which he saw himself and the nation exposed from their weakness and the powerful nations around them.

1. He may expect to see strange revolutions, like the shakings of heaven and earth. The throne of kingdoms, the Persian monarchy, would be overthrown, and the kingdoms of the heathen be destroyed, with their chariots and horsemen, every one by the sword of his brother; which may include the successive monarchies, the Grecian and Roman, and be extended to all the enemies of Christ's church and people to the end of time.

2. Zerubbabel shall be protected and defended in the midst of these commotions; or rather the promise respects his glorious descendant the Messiah, of whom he was the figure. He is emphatically the servant of the Lord, raised up to do his pleasure. I will make thee as a signet, for I have chosen thee, saith the Lord of Hosts; he is the elect of God, in whom his soul delighteth, precious as a signet, and intrusted with all power in heaven and in earth. See the note on Haggai 2:6, &c.