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CHAPTER IX

THE BOOK OF HABAKKUK

S it has reached us, the Book of Habakkuk, under the title The Oracle which Habakkuk the prophet received by vision, consists of three chapters, which fall into three sections. First: chap. i. 2-ii. 4 (or 8), a piece in dramatic form; the prophet lifts his voice to God against the wrong and violence of which his whole horizon is full, and God sends him answer. Second: chap. ii. 5 (or 9)—20, a taunt-song in a series of Woes upon the wrong-doer. Third: chap. iii., part psalm, part prayer, descriptive of a Theophany and expressive of Israel's faith in their God. Of these three sections no one doubts the authenticity of the first; opinion is divided about the second; about the third there is a growing agreement that it is not a genuine work of Habakkuk, but a poem from a period after the Exile.

I. CHAP. I. 2-II. 4 (OR 8).

Yet it is the first piece which raises the most difficult questions. All1 admit that it is to be dated somewhere along the line of Jeremiah's long career, c. 627–586. There is no doubt about the general trend of the argument it is a plaint to God on the sufferings of

Except one or two critics who place it in Manasseh's reign. See below.

the righteous under tyranny, with God's answer. But the order and connection of the paragraphs of the argument are not clear. There is also difference of opinion as to who the tyrant is-native, Assyrian or Chaldee; and this leads to a difference, of course, about the date, which ranges from the early years of Josiah to the end of Jehoiakim's reign, or from about 630 to 597.

As the verses lie, their argument is this. In chap. i. 2-4 Habakkuk asks the Lord how long the wicked are to oppress the righteous, to the paralysing of the Torah, or Revelation of His Law, and the making futile of judgment. For answer the Lord tells him, vv. 5-11, to look round among the heathen: He is about to raise up the Chaldees to do His work, a people swift, self-reliant, irresistible. Upon which Habakkuk resumes his question, vv. 12-17, how long will God suffer a tyrant who sweeps up the peoples into his net like fish? Is he to go on with this for ever? In ii. 1 Habakkuk prepares for an answer, which comes in ii. 2, 3, 4 let the prophet wait for the vision though it tarries; the proud oppressor cannot last, but the righteous shall live by his constancy, or faithfulness.

The difficulties are these. Who are the wicked oppressors in chap. i. 2-4? Are they Jews, or some heathen nation? And what is the connection between vv. I-4 and vv. 5-11? Are the Chaldees, who are described in the latter, raised up to punish the tyrant complained against in the former? To these questions three different sets of answers have been given.

First: the great majority of critics take the wrong complained of in vv. 2-4 to be wrong done by unjust and cruel Jews to their countrymen, that is, civic disorder and violence, and believe that in vv. 5-11

Jehovah is represented as raising up the Chaldees to punish the sin of Judah-a message which is pretty much the same as Jeremiah's. But Habakkuk goes further: the Chaldees themselves with their cruelties aggravate his problem, how God can suffer wrong, and he appeals again to God, vv. 12-17. Are the Chaldees to be allowed to devastate for ever? The answer is given, as above, in chap. ii. 1-4. Such is practically the view of Pusey, Delitzsch, Kleinert, Kuenen, Sinker, Driver, Orelli, Kirkpatrick, Wildeboer and Davidson, a formidable league, and Davidson says "this is the most natural sense of the verses and of the words used in them." But these scholars differ as to the date. Pusey, Delitzsch and Volck take the whole passage from i. 5 as prediction, and date it from before the rise of the Chaldee power in 625, attributing the internal wrongs of Judah described in vv. 2-4 to Manasseh's reign or the early years of Josiah.2 But the rest, on the grounds that the prophet shows some experience of the Chaldean methods of warfare, and that the account of the internal disorder in Judah does not suit Josiah's reign, bring the passage down to the reign of Jehoiakim, 608-598, or of Jehoiachin, 597. Kleinert and Von

1 See next note.

2

2 So Pusey. Delitzsch in his commentary on Habakkuk, 1843, preferred Josiah's reign, but in his O. T. Hist. of Redemption, 1881, p. 226, Manasseh's. Volck (in Herzog, Real Encyc., art. "Habakkuk," 1879), assuming that Habakkuk is quoted both by Zephaniah (see above, p. 39, n.) and Jeremiah, places him before these. Sinker (The Psalm of Habakkuk : see below, p. 127, n. 2) deems "the prophecy, taken as a whole," to bring "before us the threat of the Chaldean invasion, the horrors that follow in its train," etc., with a vision of the day "when the Chaldean host itself, its work done, falls beneath a mightier foe." He fixes the date either in the concluding years of Manasseh's reign, or the opening years of that of Josiah (Preface, 1-4).

Orelli date it before the battle of Carchemish, 605, in which the Chaldean Nebuchadrezzar wrested from Egypt the Empire of the Western Asia, on the ground that after that Habakkuk could not have called a Chaldean invasion of Judah incredible (i. 5). But Kuenen, Driver, Kirkpatrick, Wildeboer and Davidson date it after Carchemish. To Driver it must be immediately after, and before Judah became alarmed at the consequences to herself. To Davidson the description of the Chaldeans "is scarcely conceivable before the battle," "hardly one would think before the deportation of the people under Jehoiachin." This also is Kuenen's view, who thinks that Judah must have suffered at least the first Chaldean raids, and he explains the use of an undoubted future in chap. i. 5, Lo, I am about to raise up the Chaldeans, as due to the prophet's predilection for a dramatic style. "He sets himself in the past, and represents the already experienced chastisement [of Judah] as having been then announced by Jehovah. His contemporaries could not have mistaken his meaning."

Second: others, however, deny that chap. i. 2-4 refers to the internal disorder of Judah, except as the effect of foreign tyranny. The righteous mentioned there are Israel as a whole, the wicked their heathen oppressors. So Hitzig, Ewald, König and practically Smend. Ewald is so clear that Habakkuk ascribes no sin to Judah, that he says we might be led by this to assign the prophecy to the reign of the righteous Josiah ; but he prefers, because of the vivid sense which the prophet betrays of actual experience of the Chaldees, to date the

1 Pages 53, 49. Kirkpatrick (Smith's Dict. of the Bible, art. "Habakkuk," 1893) puts it not later than the sixth year of Jehoiakim.

passage from the reign of Jehoiakim, and to explain Habakkuk's silence about his people's sinfulness as due to his overwhelming impression of Chaldean cruelty. König1 takes vv. 2-4 as a general complaint of the violence that fills the prophet's day, and vv. 5-11 as a detailed description of the Chaldeans, the instruments of this violence. Vv. 5-11, therefore, give not the judgment upon the wrongs described in vv. 2-4, but the explanation of them. Lebanon is already wasted by the Chaldeans (ii. 17); therefore the whole prophecy must be assigned to the days of Jehoiakim. Giesebrecht and Wellhausen adhere to the view that no sins of Judah are mentioned, but that the righteous and wicked of chap. i. 4 are the same as in ver. 13, viz. Israel and a heathen tyrant. But this leads them to dispute that the present order of the paragraphs of the prophecy is the right one. In chap. i. 5 the Chaldeans are represented as about to be raised up for the first time, although their violence has already been described in vv. I-4, and in vv. 12-17 these are already in full career. Moreover ver. 12 follows on naturally to ver. 4. Accordingly these critics would remove the section vv. 5-II. Giesebrecht prefixes it to ver. I, and dates the whole passage from the Exile. Wellhausen calls 5-11 an older passage than the rest of the prophecy, and removes it altogether as not Habakkuk's. To the latter he assigns what remains, i. 1-4, 12-17, ii. 1-5, and dates it from the reign of Jehoiakim.3

Third: from each of these groups of critics Budde of Strasburg borrows something, but so as to construct an

1 Einl. in das A. T.

2 Beiträge zur Jesaiakritik, 1890, pp. 197 f.

3 See Further Note on p. 128.