The life of St Haggai
Very little else of his personal history has come down to us; his name has been read by later tradition to mean something like feast of the Lord.
When the returned exiles proved slow and discouraged, more occupied with rebuilding their own houses than the Lord's, Haggai took up the work of urging them back to a task that outside opposition had already stalled: the rebuilding of the Temple at Jerusalem. Alongside his contemporary Zechariah, his insistence helped the people resume that labor and see it through to completion. Haggai also foretold that the Messiah would in time appear within the very Temple whose rebuilding he had labored to see finished, a promise the Church later understood as fulfilled in Christ. Beyond this brief but consequential ministry, little more is recorded of his life.
