Prophet Haggai (Return Era)

Haggai is the most precisely dated of the prophets. On the first day of the sixth month of Darius I's second year, late August −520, he confronted the governor Zerubbabel and the high priest Joshua, eighteen years after the first return, with the Temple still in ruins: "Is it a time for you to dwell in your paneled houses, while this house lies waste?" (Haggai 1:4). He blamed drought and poor harvests on the neglect: "you earn wages to put them into a bag with holes." Three weeks later work resumed. In four short oracles over about four months he promised that "the glory of this latter house shall be greater than the former" and that God would make Zerubbabel his "signet ring."

The Book of Ezra (5:1; 6:14) credits Haggai and Zechariah with getting the Second Temple built, and it was finished in −515. With Zechariah and Malachi he is counted among the last prophets; the Talmud (Yoma 9b) says that after their deaths the holy spirit of prophecy departed from Israel. Tradition also counts him among the men of the Great Assembly.