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Habakkuk![]()
Habakkuk
INTRODUCTION
Habakkuk is not a typical prophetic book. Like other prophetic books, it consists of oracles that were given on different occasions during the ministry of the prophet, but unlike the typical prophetic book, these oracles have been arranged in the book of Habakkuk to develop a coherent, sequentially developed argument that extends through the whole book and to which each individual oracle contributes its part.
The book begins, following a very brief heading (1:1), with a lament by the prophet over the injustice rampant in Judean society (1:2–4). Yahweh responds to this complaint with the surprising announcement that he is sending the Chaldeans as his agents to take care of this problem of Judean injustice (1:5–10). Habakkuk is astonished by this announcement, and he reacts to it by uttering another lament in which he attacks God’s announced solution to injustice as being more unjust than the original problem (1:11–17). Then the prophet takes up his position to await God’s response to his second lament, which the prophet himself characterizes as a reproof (2:1). God answers this reproof with the announcement of a vision that will testify to a set time in the future. The prophet is told to record that vision clearly so that whoever reads it will be able to read it easily and live by its testimony. It is a reliable vision, its testimony is trustworthy, and Habakkuk is to patiently wait for its fulfillment even if it seems a long time in its coming. The fainthearted will not live by the vision, but the righteous person will find life in the trustworthiness of the vision (2:2–4). Still, the content of the vision itself is not revealed; instead, one finds the description of a third kind of response to life, that of the grasping, arrogant man who trusts in his amassed wealth rather than in God’s vision for life. His object of trust will prove far less reliable than the vision Habakkuk is to record. The nations will rise up to mock this greedy man, the embodiment of Chaldean imperial power, and ultimately all the earth will have to recognize that Yahweh is still in control of the world (2:5–20). It is not until chapter 3 that the vision is finally recorded. The chapter begins, after a liturgical superscription (3:1), with another prayer of Habakkuk (3:2), and then one finds a vision of the march of the divine warrior to rescue his people (3:3–15). This vision of Yahweh’s coming intervention against the powers of chaos, embodied at the moment in the Babylonians, makes a tremendous impression on the prophet, and he confesses his willingness to wait patiently for God to resolve the problem of injustice that the prophet had struggled with so long (3:16). He vows to trust in God’s ultimate salvation even if things get worse (3:17–18), and he ends on a statement of confidence, which is followed by a final liturgical subscript (3:19). One may outline the book as follows:
Outline
I. The problem of divine justice
A. Superscription (1:1)
B. Habakkuk’s initial lament (1:2–4)
C. God’s response (1:5–10)
D. Habakkuk’s second lament
1. God’s answer unsatisfactory (1:11–17)
2. Habakkuk awaits new answer (2:1)
II. God’s announcement of a resolving vision
A. Instructions about the vision
1. Record it (2:2)
2. Wait for it (2:3)
3. Trusting in it means life (2:4)
B. Wealth is far more deceitful than the vision
1. The greedy oppressor will not succeed (2:5)
2. The nations will make fun of him (2:6–19)
3. Yahweh is still in control (2:20)
III. The resolution
A. Liturgical superscription (3:1)
B. Habakkuk’s third prayer (3:2)
C. The vision of God’s coming (3:3–15)
D. Habakkuk accepts the vision
1. Will wait for Yahweh’s intervention (3:16)
2. Vow of trust (3:17–18)
3. Statement of confidence (3:19a)
E. Final liturgical subscription (3:19b)
Date
Despite the coherence between the discrete oracles in the development of the overall argument of the book, and despite the initial impression made by the arrangement in the book that lament, divine response, new lament, new divine response, and so forth, followed upon one another in quick succession, there are clear indications that the individual oracles that make up this compositional whole were originally given at widely separated times in the prophet’s ministry. The evidence for this is clearest in 1:5–10 and 1:11–17. God’s announcement that he was about to surprise his Judean audience by raising up the Chaldeans as his agents for punishing injustice (1:5–6) could hardly date later than 605 B.C. Once the Chaldeans or Neo-Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar had destroyed the Egyptian army at Carchemish and its remnant at Hamat, the threat of Nebuchadnezzar’s appearance in Palestine would not long remain unbelievable; after Nebuchadnezzar appeared on the Philistine coast in 604 B.C., Habakkuk could hardly announce his coming as a big surprise. Habakkuk’s description of the Babylonian oppressor in 1:11–17 and the nations’ characterization of him in 2:6–19, however, presuppose a much longer experience of Babylonian rule over Judah. These oracles probably date originally from the time after Nebuchadnezzar’s first capture of Jerusalem in 597 B.C. Moreover, if Habakkuk’s initial lament about injustice concerns internal Judean affairs, as seems probable, this lament probably dates to the reign of Jehoiakim, sometime between 609–605 B.C., prior to the rise of the Neo-Babylonian threat.
A number of scholars have identified the evil oppressor in Hab. 1:2–4 with the Assyrian power, and this has led them to date the book much earlier than 605 B.C. Thus Fohrer dates the book between 626 and 622 B.C. (Georg Fohrer, Introduction to the Old Testament [Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1988], 455), while Otto Eissfeldt (The Old Testament: An Introduction [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965], 422) and Artur Weiser (The Old Testament: Its Formation and Development [New York: Association Press, 1961], 263) date it between 625 and 612 B.C. It is difficult to square the description of the Chaldeans in 1:6–10 with such an early date, however. Until 616 B.C. they were basically fighting a defensive war in their own territory; they were hardly the terror of distant kings and princes. The situation changed somewhat after the fall of Ashur (615 B.C.) and Nineveh (612 B.C.), but it was not until after Babylon’s decisive defeat of Egypt in 605 B.C. that Babylon’s imperial expansion was assured and her armies acquired the aura of invincibility reflected in Hab. 1:7–10. Moreover, as A. Bentzen noted (Introduction to the Old Testament [6th ed., Copenhagen, 1961], II, 152), nothing suggests that the people described in 1:12–17 are different from those described in 1:5–10, and, as already noted, 1:11–17 and 2:6–19 clearly suggest that Judah has already experienced a period of oppression at the hands of the Babylonians.
A date between 605 and 597 B.C. is suggested by most recent commentators (Keller, 140: 605–601 B.C.; Rudolph, 194: 605–597 B.C.; Van der Woude, 9–10: 605–598 B.C.), but, if my argument is sound, some of the oracles date from before 605 B.C. and others from after 597 B.C. In other words, the prophet or a very creative editor has taken oracles originally given by Habakkuk over a period of years and has put them together in a connected meditation over the problem of divine justice. The book is composed sometime after 597 B.C., and it addresses the problem from that historical perspective, but it incorporates oracles from an earlier period to illustrate solutions to the problem that cannot be the final word. The treatment of these earlier oracles can be seen as a critique, not only of Yahweh’s earlier responses to Habakkuk, but of the similar proclamations to be found in the contemporary oracles of Jeremiah as well. Running through the book is the underlying conviction that judgment cannot be God’s final word to his people.
Since the prophet has shaped his earlier oracles into an organic whole, reflecting his post–597 B.C. perspective, it is possible that some of the oracles in the book have been significantly reworked to serve this purpose. Some of the hôy-oracles in 2:6–20, for instance, may have originally been formulated against a Judean oppressor like Jehoiakim, as a number of scholars have suggested (so Otto Eckart, “Die Stellung der Wehe-Worte in der Verkündigung des Propheten Habakuk,” ZAW 89/1 [1977]: 73–107, and Jörg Jeremias, Kultprophetie und Gerichtsverkündigung in der späten Königszeit Israels [WMANT 35; Neukirchen: Neukirchener Verlag, 1970], 57–89). But in their present form they clearly envision the Babylonian oppressor. The vision in 3:3–15 also appears to involve the reworking of an older text, in this case an archaic hymn that has been reworked by the prophet as an expression of his visionary experience.
Text
There are relatively few secondary insertions in this carefully edited book. Apart from the glosses in 2:13a and 14, the transposition or gloss in 2:18, and the insertion of the liturgical notations in 3:1, 3, 9, 13, 19, the work can be regarded as a unified composition of the prophet or a very good editor. The text of chapters 1 and 2 is in relatively good condition, though there are a number of difficult cruxes, but the textual difficulties in chapter 3, where one must deal with the reworking of an archaic hymn, are quite formidable. One may doubt whether the prophet fully understood all the lines in this archaic hymn, and at many points the modern commentator’s understanding of Habakkuk’s new construal of the text can be little more than educate...
