Mining the Minors: Haggai (6)

The Chaldean Empire was ruled from Babylon until that fateful night recorded in Daniel 5. After the death of Belshazzar, it staggered on a few years, but the relatively bloodless conquest of the empire’s capital city effectively signaled the rise of the Medo-Persians to the world stage. Cyrus quickly subdued his Median allies and moved on to other conquests, making the Persian Empire the virtually uncontested world power for the next 200 years or so.

This well-established historical note makes the last few verses of Haggai all but impossible to apply to Zerubbabel personally, though there are certainly those who will try.

6/ The Signet Ring

Haggai 2:20-23 — A Private Message for Zerubbabel

“The word of the Lord came a second time to Haggai on the twenty-fourth day of the month, ‘Speak to Zerubbabel, governor of Judah, saying, I am about to shake the heavens and the earth, and to overthrow the throne of kingdoms. I am about to destroy the strength of the kingdoms of the nations, and overthrow the chariots and their riders. And the horses and their riders shall go down, every one by the sword of his brother. On that day, declares the Lord of hosts, I will take you, O Zerubbabel my servant, the son of Shealtiel, declares the Lord, and make you like a signet ring, for I have chosen you, declares the Lord of hosts.’ ”

Coniah’s Curse

The final word from the Lord through Haggai is a personal message to Zerubbabel, the governor of Judah. Zerubbabel was in David’s line and would have been king rather than governor apart from a couple of complicating factors.

First, historians conclude that proclaiming oneself king of a Persian province was a quick and easy way to get yourself murdered and your people deported. “Politically incorrect” would not cover the magnitude of such a faux pas.

Second, Zerubbabel’s grandfather, variously known as Jehoiachin, Jeconiah and/or Coniah, was under a curse that would affect both Zerubbabel and all his descendants. You can find the specifics in the last few verses of Jeremiah 22: “Write this man down as childless, a man who shall not succeed in his days, for none of his offspring shall succeed in sitting on the throne of David and ruling again in Judah.” That’s pretty explicit, and it excluded Zerubbabel and his children from qualifying for Judah’s throne even if they ever had the temerity to claim it. Zerubbabel seems to have been a godly man, and never attempted anything so rash.

Still, here God gives him the promise that he will make him “a signet ring”. (The word “like” is a translation choice, not present in Hebrew.) That image requires a little explanation.

The Signet Ring

A signet ring, like a crown, throne or scepter, symbolized the authority of a monarch. Mere governors did not rate signet rings. When Jezebel wanted to act in Ahab’s name, she borrowed his signet ring to show she was wielding royal authority. Coniah, the cursed king, is compared to a signet ring on God’s right hand in Jeremiah, and the Lord says, “Yet I would tear you off.” All the God-given authority of the royal bloodline through Solomon ended abruptly with the curse of Coniah, meaning that if Messiah were to be descended from David, as prophesied, then that relationship would have to establish itself through another of David’s sons.

The gospels contain two distinct genealogies of Christ. Matthew’s version is generally thought to be that of Joseph, the Lord’s adoptive father, and shows the line of David passing through Solomon and establishing the legal right to rule. Luke’s genealogy, thought to be Mary’s, would then establish the Lord’s genetic connection to David. It passes through Nathan rather than Solomon, thereby bypassing Coniah and his curse.

Interestingly, though modern scholars debate all kinds of issues about the genealogies, what is not debatable is that Jews in the first century overwhelmingly recognized Jesus was indeed of the royal line. The phrase “son of David” occurs repeatedly in Matthew as a title of Christ used by both his close disciples and by those who appealed to him for help. During his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, the crowds cried “Hosanna to the Son of David!”, greatly offending the chief priests and scribes. If there were any way the leaders of Israel might have contested that claim, they would certainly have done so.

The point is this: that God’s symbolic promise to Zerubbabel through Haggai to make him the equivalent of embodied regal authority could never be realized in Zerubbabel personally. It had to point to one who was legally of Zerubbabel’s line but not under the curse of Coniah.

I Will Take You and Make You

Not all commentators understand the implications of God’s promise to Zerubbabel the same way. For example, the Wikipedia entry on Zerubbabel reads as follows: “The prophets Zechariah and Haggai both give unclear statements regarding Zerubbabel’s authority in their oracles, in which Zerubbabel was either the subject of a false prophecy or the receiver of a divine promotion to kingship.” (All Messianic implications are studiously ignored at Wikipedia, as we might expect.)

But neither of these rather binary alternatives need be the case, and neither is. When God says he will “make” somebody into something or give them something, the way he fulfills his promise is often through the person’s descendants. Take Abraham, for example. When God promised him “I will make you a great nation”, this covenant was realized not in Abraham but in his distant offspring. Abraham certainly never lived to see it. Likewise, when Nathan the prophet tells David, “The Lord will make you a house”, it was not a promise fulfilled in David’s lifetime, but rather through his descendants.

So when God says to Zerubbabel, “I will make you a signet ring”, no Israelite would conclude the prophecy had somehow failed if Zerubbabel never sat personally on the throne of Judah. The statement is not unclear at all, and it is neither a false prophecy nor a divine promotion, but rather a solemn promise to be realized in the person of Jesus Christ.

I’m sure if we asked him, Zerubbabel would have no complaints.

Overthrowing Kingdoms

What is the Lord referring to when he says, “I am about to shake the heavens and the earth, and to overthrow the throne of kingdoms”? Some commentators feel he is forecasting the demise of the Persian Empire. The Benson Commentary takes this position.

(A relevant note: The ESV’s “I am about to shake” is unfortunate in that it suggests an imminence not indicated by the Hebrew text, which simply reads, “I will shake”.)

It is somewhat difficult to see how Zerubbabel might personally be taken and “made a signet ring” during the period of Persia’s demise. In the prophecy, the shaking and overthrowing of nations and the reestablishment of royal Israelite authority symbolized in the signet are indisputably concurrent (“On that day ... I will take you”). In 330 BC, when Greece finally defeated and replaced Persia as the dominant world empire, Zerubbabel was either dead (highly probable) or else approximately 250 years old (much less probable). It is equally difficult to associate Jesus of Nazareth with the demise of the Persian Empire as he was still over three centuries from being born. In fact, no intermediate ancestor of the Lord’s legal father Joseph became king of Israel or did anything remotely memorable at any time the nations of the world were in chaos in the intertestamental period.

As a proposed fulfillment of Haggai’s prophecy, neither Greece’s conquest of Persia nor Rome’s conquest of Greece work. Nothing in either secular history or scripture points to any such “shaking” or “overthrowing” concurrent with the reestablishment of royal authority in Judah either during the lifetime of Zerubbabel or thereafter. Here again, Haggai’s penchant for dating his prophecies helps us out, placing the prophecy squarely in 520 BC, where it is easily demonstrated its fulfillment within a generation was quite impossible.

Instead, God speaks of “that day”, a future time in which he will shake kingdoms and publicly assign royal authority to someone legally of Zerubbabel’s line. While the Lord Jesus is currently seated at the right hand of God, he still awaits the day when his enemies will be made his footstool and he will be revealed to the world as the rightful king of Israel. The promise to Zerubbabel has yet to be fulfilled, but it is as certain as the resurrection, ascension and eventual universal glorification of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Finding Ourselves Where We Aren’t

I’m quite comfortable waiting for God’s promise to Zerubbabel to be fulfilled literally in the person of Jesus Christ at the end of this age. Others are more eager to appropriate God’s promises to him on behalf of the church. For example, Ellicott’s Commentary for English Readers puts it this way:

“The only satisfactory interpretation is that Haggai was charged with a prediction — purposely vague and indistinct in character — of the extension of God’s kingdom by the Christian dispensation. It appears as unnecessary to find a literal fulfilment of the prediction of the overthrow of the world-powers, ‘every one by the sword of his brother’. Nothing, in fact, can be extracted from these passages beyond a dim presage of the heathen kingdoms being pervaded by the moral influence of the Christian Church.”

That this is an utterly unsatisfactory wresting of the text out of its historical, theological and prophetic context speaks for itself. As with all figurative fulfillments postulated by non-dispensational scholars, it reduces God’s distinct and personal promises to vagueness and ambiguity, to nothing more than “dim presages”, all in the effort to find Christians where we are not and erase the ineradicable word of God with respect to the Jewish nation and its promises.

I trust the godly remnant of Israel will not bear Christendom any grudges.