they approached Zerubbabel and the heads of fathers' households, and said to them, "Let us build with you, for we, like you, seek you God; and we have been sacrificing to Him since the days of Esarhaddon king of Assyria, who brought us up here."I'm not sure what they were trying to do here. These people are the enemies of the Jews, so why are they volunteering to help? At first I thought it was just to sabotage construction, slow the process down and mess things up. That would certainly discourage any more Jews from coming back, if the Temple was mis-built and either not suitable, or perhaps even dangerous. If it collapsed after they'd put all their sacred objects in it, and those objects were destroyed, that would probably shut the whole project down.
However, I'm wondering now if they were trying something more insidious. They knew they were not "clean," and their working on the Temple would corrupt the work. So what if they were trying to corrupt the work? If non-believers were to work on building the Temple, it's quite possible that God would reject the building as unsuitable for His habitation. At minimum, this would demoralize the Jews. He might even punish them for polluting it, and they wouldn't have minded that either. Whichever it was, they were definitely lying to their own ends, hoping the Jews would be so desperate for assistance that they would let them botch the entire project.
No comments:
Post a Comment