Haggai 2:15 - Exposition

The prophet bids the people look backwards, and consider how their neglect had been visited by scanty harvests; their own experience would teach them this lesson. From this day ; viz. the twenty-fourth day of the ninth month, when this address was delivered ( Haggai 2:10 ; comp. Haggai 2:18 ). And upward; i.e. backward. He bids them go back in thought fourteen years when they first intermitted building. Before a stone, etc. This does not mean before the building was first begun, but before they began to build on the foundation already laid.