HAGGAI ITS MEANING

Haggai’s name is assigned to only one person in the Bible. Haggai is a minor prophet of Israel who wrote around 520 B.C., when Israel had returned from exile and was recreating the country (Haggai 1: 1).

The book of Haggai is one of the shortest in the Bible. It consists of only 2 chapters, a total of 38 verses, and it is completely addressed to Zerubbabel, the son of Shealtiel, governor of Judah, since God wants Zerubbabel to rebuild the temple.

Etymology of the Name Haggai

The name Haggai is possibly derived from the Hebrew verb חגג (hagag), which means to celebrate: The verb חגג (hagag) means to gather for a feast or celebration, particularly those prescribed to occur annually. Noun חג (hag) means a holiday or festive gathering.

Meaning of Haggai

Later fixed with the possessive self, the name Haggai can mean My party. But the self can also create an adjective, which seems to be preferred by scholars: for one meaning of the name Haggai, the Theological Dictionary means Feast. For “Study Bible Name List” it means Festive.

The Jones Dictionary of Proper Nouns of the Old Testament assumes that Haggai is an abbreviated form of Haggiah and that Yod is a remnant of יה (Yah) = יהו (Yahu) = יו (Yu), which in turn are abbreviated forms of the Tetragrammaton, YHWH or Yahweh. Hence Jones translates Haggai as the Festival of the Lord.

Haggai means festive, one of the twelve so-called minor prophets. He was the first of the three (Zechariah, his contemporary, and Malachi, who was about a hundred years later, the other two being) whose ministry belonged to the period of Jewish history that began after the return from the Babylonian captivity.

Hardly anything is known about his personal history. He could have been one of the captives taken to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar. He began his ministry some sixteen years after the Return. The work of rebuilding the temple had been stopped through the intrigues of the Samaritans.

After being suspended for fifteen years, the work was resumed through the efforts of Haggai and Zechariah (Ezra 6:14). Their exhortations brought the people out of their lethargy and induced them to seize the favorable opportunity that had arisen in a change in the policy of the Persian government.

Haggai’s prophecies have been characterized as follows: “There is a heavy and simple dignity in the emphatic reiteration addressed equally to every class of the community, prince, priest and people, ‘Be strong, be strong, be strong‘(2: 4). “Hold fast, stick fast to the work you have to do; “or again, ‘Consider your ways, consider, consider, consider'” (Ezra 1: 5 Ezra 1: 7 Ezra 2: 15 Ezra 18).

It is the Hebrew phrase for effort, characteristic of gifted seers of all times, to compel their listeners to turn the inside of their hearts outward to their own sight, to remove the mask of their consciousness, “to see life steadily and to see it fully.

Related Topics