Strengthen your faith in God's word

Ḥemdâ is “desire” or “delight,” and Scripture uses the very phrase Haggai uses of a man: Samuel asks Saul, “on whom is all the desire of Israel? Is it not on thee?” (1 Samuel 9:20), where the Hebrew is the same kol ḥemdat, “all the desire of.” So “the desire of all nations shall come” (Haggai 2:7) names the One all nations would long for. The Latin Vulgate reads it so: veniet desideratus cunctis gentibus, “the Desired of all nations shall come.”

The context requires it. The returned exiles wept that the house they were building was “as nothing” beside Solomon’s (2:3). God answers that He would fill it with glory, and that “the glory of this latter house shall be greater than of the former … and in this place will I give peace” (2:9). Gold could not do that: “The silver is mine, and the gold is mine” (2:8), and Solomon’s house had more of both. Only His coming could: “the Lord, whom ye seek, shall suddenly come to his temple” (Malachi 3:1). Christ came to that house, was presented in it, taught in it, and cleansed it. The promise is for the house itself, as the KJV and the Vulgate both read it: “the glory of this latter house,” gloria domus istius novissimae.

Gill answers the reading “the desirable things” directly: it is “contrary to the syntax of the words, to the context … and to facts; and, if true, would not have given this temple a greater glory than Solomon’s.” The verb “shall come” is plural in Hebrew, agreeing with “all nations,” the nearer noun, as Hebrew verbs sometimes do; it does not turn the Messiah into treasure.