Saturday, April 15, 2023

Mining the Minors: Habakkuk (1)

We have been moving through this study of the Minor Prophets in as close to chronological order as possible. Our last book was Nahum. Internal evidence strongly suggests Nahum wrote it between 660 and 630 BC. That makes my next choice a tough one: Zephaniah or Habakkuk? Both are roughly the same length, and neither can be dated with pinpoint accuracy.

I’m going with Habakkuk first for two reasons: (1) because ‘H’ comes before ‘Z’, and (2) in order to get the judgment of Babylon out of the way before we consider the judgment of Judah.

Habakkuk 1:1 — Introduction

The oracle that Habakkuk the prophet saw.”

Four words in this introductory sentence help to establish context. Apart from the prophet’s name, they don’t provide us with much information we couldn’t figure out for ourselves.

What’s in a Name?

Let’s start with the word “Habakkuk”. Other than giving us something to call the book, this is a dead end. His name is mentioned twice, once at the beginning of each of the first and last chapters, and is found nowhere else in the Old Testament. Habakkuk does make a cameo appearance in extra-biblical literature from a few decades later. In the apocryphal story of Bel and the Dragon, God miraculously transports the prophet Habakkuk from Judea to Babylon to bring Daniel a bowl of stew during his time in the lion’s den. He even has a speaking part. The story is very much over the top and not the least bit credible, but some think it suggests Habakkuk and Daniel were contemporaries.

While there was probably some overlap in their prophetic ministries, Daniel must have been well over eighty when Cyrus had him thrown into the den of lions, which, for reasons we will come to shortly, makes it very unlikely Habakkuk was still around at that point. Unless he started prophesying around age fifteen, Habakkuk must have been quite a bit older than Daniel.

Extra-biblical sources also suggest Habakkuk was a Levite, something we might infer from the fact that chapter 3 appears to be a prayer or psalm intended to be sung in the temple service, and addressed to the choirmaster. Strictly speaking, that doesn’t prove anything. We have plenty of biblical evidence that psalm writing was not limited to Levites: David, the foremost psalmist of all, was from the tribe of Judah.

Really, all we know for sure about Habakkuk is his name.

Three More Words

Another important word in this first verse is “oracle”, which in the original language simply means “burden”. Speaking God’s words on God’s behalf was an obligation, and sometimes a heavy one, especially when God said things people didn’t want to hear. Isaiah uses the word twelve times in this sense, Jeremiah six, Ezekiel, Nahum, Zechariah and Malachi once each. It’s a pretty standard OT euphemism for prophecy.

The third word is “prophet”, but if we couldn’t figure that our for ourselves over the course of the next three chapters, we wouldn’t be paying a whole lot of attention.

The final word is “saw”, a word often used of prophetic visions. This probably refers to the apocalyptic prayer of chapter 3, which reads as something witnessed rather than merely described. The first two chapters of Habakkuk are pure dialogue between the prophet and his God, and everything in them could easily be heard rather than seen. Some commentators feel chapter 3 was not originally part of the book, but to my mind at least, this statement provides an indication of its unity.

Given the timeframe, we know Habakkuk’s original audience was Judean, but unlike other prophets, his message is indirect. It takes the form of a dialogue and a prayer.

Habakkuk 1:2-4 — Habakkuk Complains to God

“O Lord, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not hear? Or cry to you ‘Violence!’ and you will not save? Why do you make me see iniquity, and why do you idly look at wrong? Destruction and violence are before me; strife and contention arise. So the law is paralyzed, and justice never goes forth. For the wicked surround the righteous; so justice goes forth perverted.”

Like Nahum, attempts to date the book of Habakkuk must rely on internal evidence. Two things about the book are strongly suggestive:

  1. Judah was in a wretched moral condition; and
  2. Babylon had yet to invade.

Conditions in Judah During Habakkuk’s Lifetime

I believe these three verses describe conditions in Judah during Habakkuk’s lifetime. The violence he is describing is not the violence of an ongoing Babylonian invasion of Judah, but rather the violence of Judean against Judean, the nobles and elites against the poor of the land. The prophet describes iniquity that he is forced to see first-hand, “strife and contention”, the paralysis of the law, and the perversion of justice. This is a society in the midst of a moral collapse.

The language Habakkuk uses is similar to that used by Ezekiel, who would later write from captivity about conditions in Jerusalem in the two decades prior to its fall. In Ezekiel, God uses this same word. He says, “The land is full of bloody crimes and the city is full of violence.” A chapter later, he says, “Is it too light a thing for the house of Judah to commit the abominations that they commit here, that they should fill the land with violence and provoke me still further to anger?” All of this points to massive internal corruption rather than the violence of war. Habakkuk writes, “The law is paralyzed, and justice never goes forth.” That’s not a problem you worry about in a city under siege. You have more immediate concerns, like being killed by the sword or starving to death.

Attempting to Date Habakkuk

Some date Habakkuk to the reign of Josiah, but the conditions he describes make this very unlikely. Josiah was the last good king of Israel, and his reforms were sweeping and in some cases unprecedented. His regime would never have tolerated the abuses Habakkuk describes, let alone been characterized by them so that a prophet would feel the need to complain to his God. That sets the prophecy in one of two possible windows:

  1. from the tail end of Manasseh’s reign to the first ten years of Josiah’s, before the young king began his reforms (650-630 BC); or
  2. between the death of Josiah and the first Babylonian invasion, when captives like Daniel were taken by Nebuchadnezzar (608-605 BC).

Once Nebuchadnezzar had invaded, there would have been no necessity for God to reveal to Habakkuk later in chapter 1 that he was going to use the Chaldeans as his disciplinary tool against Judah; Habakkuk would already have the evidence of his own eyes. God would not expect him to “wonder and be astounded” at this news if the Babylonians were already parked on his doorstep. Instead, the prophet’s reaction to God’s news bulletin suggests a twist he did not see coming.

Despite the relative shortness of the latter window, I think it is the more likely candidate, and some commentators agree. Assryia’s capital fell in 612 BC, which would explain why Habakkuk doesn’t even mention that great empire. Babylon was on the rise, “laughing at every fortress” as God describes, including the great fortress of Nineveh, fulfilling the prophecy made by Nahum a few years earlier.

Why Do You Idly Look at Wrong?

So then, in the midst of a decaying society on the brink of invasion, characterized by oppression, cruelty and the absence of law, Habakkuk cries out to the Lord in his distress. His question is “Why is this allowed? Why don’t you do something about it?”

God responds, as we will see next week, and his answer is not at all what Habakkuk is expecting. Basically, you could sum it up like this: “If you think this is bad, you ain’t seen nothing yet.”


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The walls of Babylon by Qayssar B. Hussein, CC BY-SA 4.0

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