"...hired counsellors against them, to frustrate their purpose, all the days of Koresh king of Paras, until the reign of Daryavesh king of Paras. And in the reign of Achashverosh, at the beginning of his reign, they wrote him an accusation against the inhabitants of Yehudah and Yerushlem."
The complaint was that they were rebuilding the walls of Yeru-Shala'im (Ezra often writes it as Yerushlem - יְר֣וּשְׁלֶ֔ם - which is Aramaic), restoring the city's suburbs, and more importantly erecting a Second Temple; the details of the letter form the next verses, but the key for our purposes lies in verse 22, where Koresh's successor and Daryavesh's predecessor Artachshasta, as he is called in Yehudit, Cambyses II (though Jewish tradition seems not to know this, probably because of the scribal error that names him as Achashverosh in verse 4) responds by issuing an edict:
"to cause these men to cease, and that this city should not be built, until a decree shall be made by me."
"And so," according to verse 24, "the work ceased on the house of Elah'a which is at Yerushlem; and it stayed ceased until the second year of the reign of Dar-Yavesh king of Paras."
Koresh is better known to us moderns as Cyrus the Great. Cambyses came to the throne of Persia at his death in 530, and was himself assassinated in 522, but he served as king of Babylon from 538, and may have issued his edict wearing that crown. Either way, the earliest date for the instruction to cease work would be 538 BCE. Between Cambyses and Daryavesh there was the very brief reign of Smerdis (Bardiya).
Daryavesh is the Yehudit rendering, Dârayaua'ush is the Medean, though he is generally known in English as Darius - somewhat unhelpfully as there were three kings named Darius, of which the later two were Darius III Codomannus, originally named Artashata but called Codomannus by the Greeks, who was the last king of the Achaemenid Empire of Persia, reigning from 336-330 BCE, when he became one of the more famous victims of the conquests of Alexander of Macedon; and Darius II Nothus or Darius II Ochus, who succeeded Artaxerxes I at third-hand in 423 BCE, but that bloody tale is not relevant to our purposes so you can read it in your own time at the link to his name. There may also have been a fourth Darius, known as Darius the Mede; he is the king at the core of the Book of Daniel, and your call whether that is a work of pure fiction or an actual historical tale.
"Our" Darius is also known as Darius Hystaspis (Hystapses was his father's name, in the Greek accounts anyway; Vištāspa in the Persian), he came to the throne in 522 BCE, and reigned until 485. One of the "Greats", as you will discover at the link to his name.
"And the elders of the Yehuday'e built and prospered, through the prophesying of Chagai the prophet and Zechar-Yah ben Ido. And they built it, and finished it, according to the instruction of the god of Yisra-El, and according to the decree of Koresh, and Dar-Yavesh, and Artachshast, king of Paras."
Ezra 6:15 completes the tale, just four years later:
"And the house was finished on the third day of the month of Adar, which was in the sixth year of the reign of Darius the king."
The house, meaning the Temple; the city walls and the remainder of the city will not be completed until Ezra's own time, many decades later.
What exactly Chagai did and said to achieve this transformation is recorded in the two short chapters that are his book.
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In fact, the book covers a period of barely four months, and it can be dated very precisely to the year 520, because Chagai begins by stating that:
"In the second year of King Dar-Yavesh, in the sixth month, on the first day of the month, the word of YHVH came to Zeru-Bavel ben She'altiy-El, the governor of Yehudah, and to Yehoshu'a ben Yeho-Tsadak the high priest, in the hand of Chagai the prophet saying... "
Effectively - and indeed, very effectively: "Get up and build the Temple!". His first argument is that the crops will never yield a decent harvest until the rebuilding is achieved, because the harvest depends on the goodwill of the deity, and it is the deity's own palace that is in ruins. To add encouragement, but also because he appears to have been a man of deep cultural inclination, he paints a picture of a future Temple that will outshine even the glorious achievement of King Shelomoh (Solomon) in the First Temple - an aspiration which, sadly, was not fulfilled in the eventuality. Finally he acclaims Zeru-Bavel, currently the Persian-appointed governor, but soon to be the reinstated Mashiyach himself, the heir to the throne of David (the concept of Mashiyach should not be confused with that of Moshi'a).
Did Chagai both deliver the oracles and scribe the parchment, or was there a team of Guildsmen who worked on the text with him, and a scribe amongst them who wrote it down? The modern perception of the Prophets likes to imagine them inspired to make up their oracles as they went along, but the complex word-games and scriptural allusions of the text suggest something worked on like a poem over a period of time, drafted and redrafted until it said clearly and precisely what was wanted to be said, and then Chagai, as Master of the Guild, delivered it by hand, not by mouth, as that opening verse confirms - though highly likely the text was read out in the public square many times, by him, by other Guild-members, so that everyone could say they had heard it.
This view is largely supported in Jewish tradition, though it is to "the Men of the Great Assembly" that Bava Batra 15a attributes it, as it does the oracles of Zechar-Yah and Malachi. Rashi concurs with this view (his commentary on Chagai can be found here - make sure you click "show", not "hide", or you will get the text without the Rashi). I fear, however, that "Men of the Great Assembly" may be an anachronism, as this illustrious body did not come into being until Nechem-Yah's time at the earliest, and probably not before 410 BCE, a full century after Chagai and Zeru-Bavel.
The fact that it was delivered by hand also makes Chagai different from many of the other Prophets, who may indeed have "talked in tongues", or "communicated spontaneous visions" - Zechar-Yah on several occasions fits that description, and Zechar-Yah is not described as a Navi, which Chagai is repeatedly. This may well be the clue to explaining the differences between a Prophet and a Seer.
Chagai 1 2
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David Prashker
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