Summary: Bible - Book of Habakkuk

The GIST

Habakkuk is three chapters long and unlike any other prophetic book. Most prophets speak to the people on God's behalf. Habakkuk speaks to God on the people's behalf, and what he says is a complaint. Why does God look on while violence and injustice go unpunished? And when God answers that he is sending the brutal armies of Babylon as the punishment, the prophet protests again: how can that be justice? The book follows this argument to its end and then turns into a song. It moves, as one description has it, from a faith of perplexity and doubt to the height of absolute trust.

It stands eighth among the twelve Minor Prophets, between Nahum and Zephaniah. Nothing is known of the man beyond his book. The reference to the rising power of the Chaldeans, the Babylonians, places him in the later seventh century BC, and most scholars think the reign of King Jehoiakim of Judah, 609 to 597 BC, fits best: after Babylon had become the great power of the region and before it besieged Jerusalem. From this small book comes one of the most influential sentences in the Bible, "the just shall live by his faith."

What It Says

The book divides cleanly into three parts of different kinds: a dialogue between the prophet and God, a series of woes, and a psalm.

The first complaint (1:1 to 4). Habakkuk begins without any preamble. "O LORD, how long shall I cry, and thou wilt not hear! even cry out unto thee of violence, and thou wilt not save!" He is looking at his own society. Plunder and violence are in front of him, with strife and contention. The law has gone slack, the wicked surround the righteous, and the courts hand down twisted verdicts. His question is not whether God exists. It is why God is letting this continue.

God's first answer (1:5 to 11). The reply is not comforting. God tells him to look out among the nations and be amazed, "for I will work a work in your days, which ye will not believe, though it be told you." He is raising up the Chaldeans, "that bitter and hasty nation," who march across the earth seizing homes that are not theirs. The portrait is terrifying. Their horses are swifter than leopards and fiercer than wolves at evening. They fly like an eagle hurrying to eat. They gather captives like sand, laugh at kings and fortresses, and credit their strength to their own god. This is the instrument God has chosen to deal with Judah.

The second complaint (1:12 to 2:1). Habakkuk accepts that God has appointed Babylon for judgment and correction. What he cannot accept is the fit between the judge and the judged. He appeals to God's own character: "Thou art of purer eyes than to behold evil, and canst not look on iniquity." Then why does God keep silent "when the wicked devoureth the man that is more righteous than he?" Judah is guilty, but Babylon is worse. He pictures humanity as fish in the sea, with no ruler to protect them, and the conqueror as a fisherman hauling them up with hook and net, delighted with the catch, and then offering sacrifice to his net because it has made him rich. Is he to go on emptying that net and killing nations forever?

Having said this, the prophet does something admirable. He does not walk away. "I will stand upon my watch, and set me upon the tower," he says, and waits to see what answer will come.

God's second answer (2:2 to 5). The answer comes with an instruction to make it public and permanent: "Write the vision, and make it plain upon tables, that he may run that readeth it." It concerns a time that has been fixed but has not yet arrived, and so it asks for patience: "though it tarry, wait for it; because it will surely come." Then the heart of it. The arrogant man is not upright within, "but the just shall live by his faith." The proud conqueror is as greedy as the grave and as insatiable as death, gathering nations to himself, and he will not last. The one who stays faithful will live.

Five woes (2:6 to 20). What follows is a taunt song, a mocking riddle placed in the mouths of the conquered nations and aimed at their oppressor. It consists of five woes. The first is against the plunderer who piles up what is not his: "Because thou hast spoiled many nations, all the remnant of the people shall spoil thee." The second is against the one who builds his house on unjust gain and sets his nest on high to be safe; the very stones and beams of that house will cry out against him. The third is against the one "that buildeth a town with blood." All that labor is only fuel for the fire, since a different future is coming: "For the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea." The fourth is against the one who gets his neighbor drunk in order to shame him; the cup will come round to him. The fifth is against the maker of idols, who says to wood, Awake, and to dumb stone, Arise. There is no breath in it at all. The section ends by turning from the lifeless images to the living God: "But the LORD is in his holy temple: let all the earth keep silence before him."

The prayer (chapter 3). The last chapter has its own heading, "A prayer of Habakkuk the prophet," with musical directions at the beginning and the end. The argument is over, and the prophet prays. He has heard, and he is afraid. He asks God to act again as in the past and adds a plea that has been repeated ever since: "in wrath remember mercy."

Then he sees God coming. The vision is drawn from Israel's oldest memories and from the storm. God comes from Teman and Mount Paran, his glory covering the heavens. Plague goes before him. The ancient mountains crumble, the deep roars, sun and moon stand still at the flash of his arrows. He marches through the earth and threshes the nations, and the purpose of it is stated plainly: "Thou wentest forth for the salvation of thy people."

The effect on the prophet is physical. His body trembles, his lips quiver, his bones feel hollow. He knows the invasion is still coming and that he must wait quietly for the day of trouble. And then he says the thing the book has been moving toward:

"Although the fig tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines; the labour of the olive shall fail, and the fields shall yield no meat; the flock shall be cut off from the fold, and there shall be no herd in the stalls." And the next verse: "Yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will joy in the God of my salvation."

Nothing in his circumstances has changed. The harvest he describes is a total failure, the ruin an invading army leaves behind. The joy rests on God alone. The book closes with him sure-footed on the heights, like a deer.

Why It Matters

Habakkuk gives believers permission to question. He challenges God's management of the world twice, bluntly, and is not rebuked for it. He is answered. The answer does not explain everything. It asks him to trust that evil carries its own undoing and that God's timing can be waited for, and it shows him enough of God to make that trust possible. The movement of the book, from "how long?" to "yet I will rejoice," has made it a companion for people in dark times.

The verse at its center has had an extraordinary history. In Judaism, the Talmud says that Habakkuk gathered all 613 commandments into one: the righteous shall live by his faith. In Christianity, the New Testament quotes it three times, in Romans, Galatians and Hebrews, as a foundation for its teaching on faith, and it became a key text of the Protestant Reformation; Martin Luther took it to teach the doctrine of faith alone. The traditions do not read it identically. The Hebrew word can mean faith or faithfulness, and translators still differ.

The book is also important to the history of the biblical text. Among the first Dead Sea Scrolls found in 1947 was a commentary on its first two chapters, written by a community that applied the prophet's words about Babylon to the Roman threat of their own day. The Hebrew text it quotes differs remarkably little from the standard text copied many centuries later. That scroll does not include chapter 3, which has led some scholars to think the psalm was added later, though it appears in every copy of the ancient Greek translation. Some think the author was a temple prophet or musician. The closing note, "To the chief singer on my stringed instruments," suggests the prayer was sung.

Who Should Read It

Read Habakkuk if you have ever wanted to ask God why, and wondered whether you were allowed to. It can be read in fifteen minutes and thought about for years. It speaks to anyone troubled by injustice that seems to go unanswered, and its last three verses are among the finest statements of faith under pressure ever written.