Mining the Minors: Habakkuk (2)

Manifest Destiny was an ideology promoted by newspaper editor John L. O’Sullivan in the 1850s in order to justify the annexation of Texas and Oregon by the United States. He maintained it was God’s will for the new nation to expand “from sea to shining sea”. Though contested by some, his idea had sufficient currency to get itself trotted out repeatedly to validate the acquisitions of New Mexico and California, and later the purchase of Alaska.

All Manifest Destiny really means is “It should be obvious we deserve whatever we want.” But attaching God’s name to it was magic in selling it to the nation.

Same Old Same Old

It’s not hard to see how a cultural mindset weaned on Manifest Destiny would come to view America’s world dominance post-WWII as the rightful spoils of the war effort, or the US’s endless interference in Europe, Asia and the Middle East over subsequent decades as perfectly reasonable given the new geopolitical realities. But few proponents of American exceptionalism and expansionism in later years stamped their geopolitical aspirations with God’s imprimatur.

Maybe I’m cynical, but I always found these ideas spectacularly arrogant. They look to me like the same dogma all empire builders throughout history have embraced: that the biggest dog in the yard makes the rules. The only twist is it’s dressed up with a big “God wills it” to get believers on board; patriotism metastasizing into religious zeal.

Something similar was at work in Babylon more than two and a half thousand years ago, and God chose Habakkuk to hear about it just before Judah became a much earlier version of Texas or California, formerly-independent territory gobbled up by the latest world empire on the rise.

Habakkuk 1:5-11 — God’s Reply

“Look among the nations, and see; wonder and be astounded. For I am doing a work in your days that you would not believe if told. For behold, I am raising up the Chaldeans, that bitter and hasty nation, who march through the breadth of the earth, to seize dwellings not their own. They are dreaded and fearsome; their justice and dignity go forth from themselves. Their horses are swifter than leopards, more fierce than the evening wolves; their horsemen press proudly on. Their horsemen come from afar; they fly like an eagle swift to devour. They all come for violence, all their faces forward. They gather captives like sand. At kings they scoff, and at rulers they laugh. They laugh at every fortress, for they pile up earth and take it. Then they sweep by like the wind and go on, guilty men, whose own might is their god!”

You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet

As I mentioned last week, when Habakkuk complained to the Lord about the oppression and injustice he was seeing all around him in Judah in the late seventh century BC, God’s response probably caught him by surprise. Basically, we could sum it up with the title of that old BTO song, You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet. “You don’t like oppression, injustice and the abandonment of the rule of law, Habakkuk? Well, it’s going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better.”

That may sound a bit harsh to our ears, but God was not saying anything new here. Exile in a foreign empire had always been on the table going back to the giving of the law in the wilderness. Moses predicted it. It was the inevitable consequence of idolatry and disobedience to God’s law. The prophets warned Israel repeatedly about it, and Judah had already seen the northern ten tribes all but swept away into Assyrian captivity.

What Habakkuk had perhaps not realized was the particular mechanism God would use to keep his word, specifically that he would judge wicked Judah by way of even-more-wicked Chaldea.

Bitter and Hasty

So here is God’s description of the instrument he intends to use to discipline his people.

First of all, he says, they are bitter and hasty. The word translated “bitter” means discontented and miserable. Some people can keep such feelings to themselves. Others use discontentment as an excuse to punish those around them. Scale up the refusal to be satisfied with what you have to the national level, especially in a powerful ethnic bloc, and you have a recipe for making others bitter too.

The word translated “hasty” means precipitous. The discontent of the Chaldeans made them urgent about going and getting what they wanted. Not rash, but certainly looking for every opportunity to make a move. If they saw something they liked, they went after it in short order. This was how Assyria vanished from the world stage: Nabopolassar king of Babylon correctly perceived that the Assyrian Empire was getting a little long in the tooth and internally divided, and he took the opportunity to stage an assault on its capital city. He didn’t wait for his enemies to collapse under the weight of their own ennui and lack of cohesiveness; he went straight for the jugular and made the empire disintegrate faster.

The Breadth of the Earth

The Chaldeans were not content to raid a few neighbors to enrich themselves. Though the Neo-Babylonian Empire lasted less than a century, at its height it spanned (in modern geographic terms) from Turkey in the north to Saudi Arabia in the south, taking in all of modern Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and of course Israel, and a big chunk of modern day Iran in the east. The Chaldeans were impressively acquisitive, and not the least bit concerned about traveling a significant distance to conquer anyone they considered vulnerable. The Lord says, “They fly like an eagle to devour.”

We sometimes think of “Chaldean” and “Babylonian” as synonyms, but the Chaldeans were a separate people who had actually invaded Babylonia from the south in Arabia. Formerly, the Babylonians had allied with the Assyrians to keep the Chaldeans in check, but after the Assyrians committed a series of atrocities in Babylon, the Babylonians began to look to their former enemies for help until eventually the Chaldean general Nabopolassar assumed the reins of government in Babylon. The city remained the same, but its nationality changed. Thus when we speak of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, it is this group of Johnny-come-lately Arab southerners headquartered in Babylon to which we are referring. When the Medo-Persians conquered Babylon, they did much the same thing. Babylon was the kind of city empires preferred to take over and use for themselves rather than raze to the ground.

In taking other cities, the Neo-Babylonians were not so generous. As the Lord says, “They laugh at every fortress, for they pile up earth and take it.” The expansion of the empire outward from Babylonia was swift and violent.

From Themselves

The Lord tells Habakkuk, “Their justice and dignity go forth from themselves.” History does not speak highly of the justice and dignity of the Neo-Babylonians, and I don’t think the Lord is saying the latest world empire was either just or dignified by the standards of scripture. Rather, the point he is making here is much like the arrogant and false idea of Manifest Destiny. Babylon defined these concepts for itself. In the time of the Judges, everyone “did what was right in his own eyes”. They defined right and wrong for themselves. After all, it was “manifest” to them and they thought it should be just as obvious to everyone else. So too the Babylonians decided for themselves what was appropriate and imposed it on all their neighbors. We see this in the book of Daniel, where Nebuchadnezzar sets up a great statue and declares that everyone in the empire must bow down and worship it. He felt no concerns about the religious preferences of the people he had conquered; rather, he expected them to comply with his wishes. Why not? His wishes were manifest.

There is a similar spirit abroad in the world today. Ideologues twist words and concepts to mean whatever they want them to mean, including equity, truth, justice and now even age-old concepts like “men” and “women”. All are simply redefined on the fly to mean whatever is useful to those who use them. When that happens, we are not in a good place. Power is an idol, and God says of the Chaldeans, “Their own might is their god.” Nietzsche taught something similar with the concept of the “will to power”.

Of course, nobody who takes it upon themselves to redefine truth for the world succeeds for long. Only God can accurately define concepts like justice and dignity, or for that matter men and women. Morality, like biological reality, is not something we can just make up for ourselves.