to you like nothing?’ answers the second. To the old, who were looking back to the ‘former glory’, the new temple was altogether inferior. According to their judgement, it was ‘like nothing’ in comparison. They had no gold to overlay the interior, no ark to place in the Most Holy Place, no sacred objects with which to worship God; their resources were inadequate, the building work had made little progress since its inception, and the ‘ruin’ (1:9) that lay before them seemed to contradict the prophets
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