Haggai1chapter 1

The first group came home under Cyrus's decree in 538 BC, rebuilt the altar, and laid the temple foundation around 536 BC. Then local opposition and official complaints froze the project, and it stayed frozen for about sixteen years. People got on with their lives.

The dates in this book are given by the Persian regnal calendar, which lets us convert them to the modern calendar within a day. The second year of Darius I was 520 BC. Darius had come to the throne in a violent succession crisis in 522 BC and spent his first years putting down revolts across the empire — a fact he advertised on a huge trilingual inscription cut into a cliff at Behistun.

Haggai's charge is specific: "Is it time for you, O ye, to dwell in your cieled houses, and this house lie waste?" Paneled or roofed houses were finished construction, the kind you build when you intend to stay. The temple, meanwhile, was a foundation with weeds on it.

The economic diagnosis follows: you have sown much and bring in little, you eat but are not filled, you earn wages to put into a bag with holes. A drought had been called on the land, the grain, the new wine, the oil, and the labor of their hands.

The response is what makes this book remarkable. Twenty-three days later, the whole community — governor, high priest, and people — went to work. Almost no prophet in the Old Testament gets obeyed that fast.