An Atheist Explores the Bible Part 184: The New Improved Temple; Get Yours Today (Haggai 1-2)

Haggai 1-2
The New Improved Temple; Get Yours Today.

Welcome to another instalment of An Atheist Explores Sacred Texts (Bible version).
In this series I work my way chapter-by-chapter through the King James Bible, commenting on it from the point of view of the text as literature and mythology.

For more detail, see the introductory post http://bit.ly/2F8f9JT
For the online KJV I use, see here http://bit.ly/2m0zVUP

And now:

Haggai 1
“Ye have sown much, and bring in little; ye eat, but ye have not enough; ye drink, but ye are not filled with drink; ye clothe you, but there is none warm; and he that earneth wages earneth wages to put it into a bag with holes.”

The book of Haggai takes place in the reign of Darius, when the Israelites have returned to Jerusalem. Zerubbabel is the governor of Judah (presumably as a representative of Darius) and Joshua son of Josedech is high priest. Where Haggai fits into this we don’t know, but he gets a message from God. Despite returning to their homeland, the Israelites are still suffering hardships, and God tells Haggai that this is because they haven’t restored the temple yet. Haggai passes this message on, and Zerubbabel and Joshua comply, or, as the verse has it, their spirits are stirred into action by God. (If He was able to this all along then Haggai’s intervention seems a bit redundant, but never mind).

Haggai 2
“The glory of this latter house shall be greater than of the former, saith the LORD of hosts: and in this place will I give peace, saith the LORD of hosts.”

More messages from God to Haggai. They largely concern the fact that, although the new temple may not be as grand-looking as Solomon’s original, it will become much greater. This is the reason that I assume Haggai was included, since it seems to point towards the wider spread of the Christian church, although possibly also because it provides a glimpse at the post-exile situation of the Israelites.

However, says God, the people have become unclean in a similar fashion to how sacred uncleanliness can be spread – if a priest touches a dead body and then touches sacred items, he spreads the unclean-ness (seriously, which is the proper way of expressing this concept?) to the sacred objects. What isn’t made clear here, though, are either the root cause of the unclean-ness of the people (I assume their old Baal worship that “caused” the exile in the first place) nor what they can do about it. However, overall the message is hopeful.

And that’s about it for Haggai. It makes a nice change to have a prophet mercifully free of doom and gloom; Haggai is more philosophical and concerned somewhat with proper worship, but also with the renewal and spread of God’s covenant, and as such it’s well-placed in the Christian biblical narrative, leading into the New Testament. But there’s still a couple of old-school prophets to go...

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