Haggai’s place in the succession of prophecy ought now to be clear to us. The meagreness of his words and their crabbed style, his occupation with the construction of the Temple, his unfulfilled hope in Zerubbabel, his silence on the great inheritance of truth delivered by his predecessors, and the absence from his prophesying of all visions of God’s character and all emphasis upon the ethical elements of religion—these have moved some to depress his value as a prophet almost to the vanishing point. Nothing could be more unjust. In his opening message Haggai evinced the first indispensable power of the prophet: to speak to the situation of the moment, and to succeed in getting men to take up the duty at their feet; in another message he announced a great ethical principle; in his last he conserved the Messianic traditions of his religion, and though not less disappointed than Isaiah in the personality to whom he looked for their fulfilment, he succeeded in passing on their hope undiminished to future ages. FOOTNOTES: [657] See above, pp. 210-18, and emphasise specially the facts that the most pronounced adherents of Kosters’ theory seek to qualify his absolute negation of a Return under Cyrus, by the admission that some Jews did return; and that even Stade, who agrees in the main with Schrader that no attempt was made by the Jews to begin building the Temple till 520, admits the probability of a stone being laid by Sheshbazzar about 536. [658] See above, pp. 218 ff. [659] Hag. i. 4. [660] Art. “Haggai,” _Encyc. Brit._ [661] Heb. Daryavesh. [662] Heb. _by the hand of_. [663] See above, pp. 199 f. and 221. [664] See below, pp. 258, 279, 292 ff. [665] Heb. _saying_. [666] For לאֹ עֶת־בֹּא = _not the time of coming_ read with Hitzig and Wellhausen לאֹ עַתָּ בָא, _not now is come_; for עַתָּ cf. Ezek. xxiii. 4, Psalm lxxiv. 6. [667] The emphasis may be due only to the awkward grammatical construction. [668]‎ ספונים, from ספן, _to cover_ with planks of cedar, 2 Kings vi. 9: cf. iii. 7. [669] Heb. _set your hearts_ (see Vol. I., pp. 258, 275, 321, 323) _upon your ways_; but _your ways_ cannot mean here, as elsewhere, _your conduct_, but obviously from what follows _the ways_ you have been led, _the way_ things have gone with you—the barren seasons and little income. [670] The Hebrew and Versions here insert _set your hearts upon your ways_, obviously a mere clerical repetition from ver. 5. [671] For והנה למעט read with the LXX. והיה למעט or ויהי. [672] The עליכם here inserted in the Hebrew text is unparsable, not found in the LXX. and probably a clerical error by dittography from the preceding על־כן. [673] Heb. _heavens are shut from dew_. But perhaps the מ of מטל should be deleted. So Wellhausen. There is no instance of an intransitive Qal of כלא. [674] Query? [675] Vol. I., pp. 162 ff. [676] See above, p. 227. [677] The LXX. wrongly takes this last verse of chap. i. as the first half of the first verse of chap. ii.