The Second Message (2:1-9). 

        The view expressed above that much of the stone-work of the Temple had been left standing seems confirmed by ver. 3, for a comparison would not have been possible, if nothing had been left to compare. Haggai encourages the people by telling them:

        a) The “shaking” which brought down Babylon was not, as the exiles had hoped, the final one. Soon this final “shak­ing” would come, and then the house they were building would be there to welcome Jehovah as He set up His kingdom.

        b) Promises like that of Isa 56:7 would see their fulfilment there. 2:7 is only Messianic in the wider sense. The A.V. rendering “the desire of all nations” is based on the Vulgate and is incompatible with the Hebrew. We must either render as in the R.V. or perhaps better “the desired of all nations shall come” i.e. all the nations which Jehovah desires and chooses. Obviously for his hearers this implied the coming of the Messiah as well,

        c) The outward beautifying of the Temple could await God’s giving (ver. 8). From His people at the time He asked no more than they could give.

        d) The Temple was to see the fulfilment of God’s pur­poses (ver. 9). Here the essential identity of the second temple with Solomon’s is affirmed, thus confirming that extensive repair rather than a new building was needed. From the building of Solomon’s temple to the destruction of Herod’s in A.D. 70 it was essentially the same building.

        The view that the rebuilding of the Temple only began in 521 B.C. and that it was done mainly by those that had never been taken into captivity, rather than by those that had returned from Babylonia, bases itself confidently on the ex­pression “all ye people of the land” (ver. 4). It is perfectly true that in Ezra “the people (or peoples) of the land” is a technical expression both for the other peoples living in Palestine and for those of Israelite origin who had never gone into captivity and were often semi-heathen. But since we cannot date Ezra before 400 B.C. at the earliest, it seems hardly scholarship to assume that the phrase must have had the same technical meaning more than a hundred years earlier, the more so as less than a century before that it meant simply the common people in general (IIKings 23:30). The assumption is the more remarkable, because the term “the remnant of the people” otherwise used by Haggai (1:12; 2:2) is by common consent a technical term meaning those that had returned from captivity. The use of “all ye people of the land” may simply be an encouragement by reminding them that they once again possessed the land.