Note 708 — Chapter XVIII

This is the ambiguous clause on different interpretations of which so much has been founded: לְמִן־הַיּוֹם אֲשֶׁר־יֻסַּד הֵיכַל־יְהוָֹה. Does this clause, in simple parallel to the previous one, describe the day on which the prophet was speaking, the twenty-fourth day of the ninth month, the terminus a quo of the people’s retrospect? In that case Haggai regards the foundation-stone of the Temple as laid on the twenty-fourth day of the ninth month 520 B.C., and does not know, or at least ignores, any previous laying of a foundation-stone. So Kuenen, Kosters, Andrée, etc. Or does למן signify up to the time the foundation-stone was laid, and state a terminus ad quem for the people’s retrospect? So Ewald and others, who therefore find in the verse a proof that Haggai knew of an earlier laying of the foundation-stone. But that למן is ever used for ועד cannot be proved, and indeed is disproved by Jer. vii. 7, where it occurs in contrast to ועד. Van Hoonacker finds the same, but in a more subtle translation of למן. מן, he says, is never used except of a date distant from the speaker or writer of it; למן (if I understand him aright) refers therefore to a date previous to Haggai to which the people’s thoughts are directed by the ל and then brought back from it to the date at which he was speaking by means of the מן: “la préposition ל signifie la direction de l’esprit vers une époque du passé d’où il est ramené par la préposition מן.” But surely מן can be used (as indeed Haggai has just used it) to signify extension backwards from the standpoint of the speaker; and although in the passages cited by Van Hoonacker of the use of למן it always refers to a past date—Deut. ix. 7, Judg. xix. 30, 2 Sam. vi. 11, Jer. vii. 7 and 25—still, as it is there nothing but a pleonastic form for מן, it surely might be employed as מן is sometimes employed for departure from the present backwards. Nor in any case is it used to express what Van Hoonacker seeks to draw from it here, the idea of direction of the mind to a past event and then an immediate return from that. Had Haggai wished to express that idea he would have phrased it thus: למן היום אשר יסד היכל יהוה ועד היום הזה (as Kosters remarks). Besides, as Kosters has pointed out (pp. 7 ff. of the Germ. trans. of Het Herstel, etc.), even if Van Hoonacker’s translation of למן were correct, the context would show that it might refer only to a laying of the foundation-stone since Haggai’s first address to the people, and therefore the question of an earlier foundation-stone under Cyrus would remain unsolved. Consequently Haggai ii. 18 cannot be quoted as a proof of the latter. See above, p. 216.