August: The overlaps between Haggai’s various sayings in verses 2–11, with their repeated resumptive beginnings describing them as Yahweh’s words, suggest that these are sayings Haggai delivered on different occasions and that the narrator has brought them together into a coherent longer account of Haggai’ s challenge concerning the need to take up the task of building the temple. The account thus brings together the fact that the people are living in restored homes when Yahweh is not and the fact that they have been experiencing economic problems.

1:1 Given the chaotic nature of the events that brought Darius to the throne and the complication of moving between years calculated as beginning variously in January or in the spring or in the fall, we do not know how Haggai’s narrator would cal…