Haggai 1:4

for you, O ye Lit., for you, you: you, yourselves, R. V. The repetition of the pronoun is emphatic, "you are the people I mean;" or you in implied contrast to Almighty God, comp. 1 Samuel 25:24, where Abigail, anxious to appease David's anger at the churlishness of Nabal, exclaims, "upon me, my Lord, I (am the person at fault), let this iniquity be."

your cieled houses Lit. your houses cieled, i.e. your houses(and they too) cieled. The adjective thus added without an article has the force of a predicate and so becomes emphatic. With the article it would form part of the subject. Comp. Psalms 143:10: "Let Thy Spirit good (as it is, and therefore ready to help and guide the sinful and infirm), lead me," &c. The translators in A. V., feeling the force of the adjective as a predicate, have broken the first part of the sentence into a separate proposition, "Thy Spirit is good, lead me," &c. The Prayer-Book version is, "Let thy loving Spirit lead me," &c.

cieled Lit. covered or boarded. The word is used with reference to the roof of the Temple, which was high-pitched like our modern roofs, and cieled with boards within. "He coveredthe house with beams (rafters) and boards of cedar," 1 Kings 6:9. It is also used of the cieling with boards of Solomon's house of the forest of Lebanon, 1 Kings 7:3, and of some kind of covering or boarding (the passage is obscure) of his "Porch of Judgment," 1 Kings 7:7. The practice was luxurious and magnificent even in a king (Jeremiah 22:14). Yet they who professed themselves unable to restore the House of the Lord were indulging in it in their own houses. They built costly houses for themselves, even using, it may be, to decorate them, the cedar wood which had been brought for the Temple (Ezra 3:7; Dict. of the Bible, Art. Zerubbabel), and had grown indifferent to the ruin and desolation of the House of God.