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I. Introduction: When God Blames Your Poverty on Construction Delays
The Book of Haggai—חַגַּי (Chaggai, meaning "festal" or "my feast," possibly indicating birth during a festival)—comprises two brief chapters delivered over four months in 520 BCE, making it one of the Hebrew Bible's most precisely dated prophetic books and its second shortest (after Obadiah). This post-exilic prophecy addresses the returned Judean community eighteen years after Cyrus's decree allowing exiles to return and rebuild Jerusalem's Temple (538 BCE), confronting a demoralized people who've prioritized building their own בָּתִּים סְפוּנִים (battim sefunim, "paneled houses") while YHWH's house lies חָרֵב (charev, "in ruins"), experiencing economic hardship that Haggai directly attributes to this misplaced priority. The prophet delivers a straightforward transactional theology: rebuild the Temple first, and economic prosperity will follow; continue neglecting it, and your crops will fail, wages will disappear into bags with holes, and divine blessing will remain withheld. This is Scripture's most explicit prosperity-through-proper-priorities text, promising that YHWH will "shake the heavens and earth" (2:6), that the Temple's future glory will exceed its former splendor (2:9), and that Zerubbabel will be YHWH's חוֹתָם (chotam, "signet ring").