A prophet who argues, and is answered
The shape of the book is a conversation in four moves. Habakkuk complains that God does nothing about violence in Judah (1:2-4). God answers that he is doing something, and it is the Chaldeans (1:5-11). Habakkuk complains again, harder, that the cure is worse than the disease (1:12 to 2:1). God answers a second time with the vision, the woes, and the silence of 2:20. Scripture does not present the questions as faithlessness. They are put by a man who addresses God as 'Art not thou from everlasting, O Jehovah my God, my Holy One? we shall not die.' (1:12), and God answers rather than rebukes. The book teaches that the honest question belongs inside faith and gets a reply.
Habakkuk 1:2 · Habakkuk 1:12 · Habakkuk 2:1
The righteous shall live by his faith
Everything in the book narrows to one line at 2:4: 'Behold, his soul is puffed up, it is not upright in him; but the righteous shall live by his faith.' The verse sets two men against each other. One is swollen with himself, which is the Chaldean of chapter 1 who sacrifices to his own net. The other stays alive by 'emunah, a word whose root sense is firmness, the steadiness of a thing that holds. In the setting the promise is concrete: when the army comes, the righteous man survives by holding to what God said. The New Testament quotes the verse three times and makes it the ground of justification, which is where most readers meet it first. Both readings run through the same word, and the argument over which one it carries is set out in the difficulties below.
Habakkuk 2:4
Write it plain, because it will keep its appointment
God's answer begins with an instruction about legibility. 'Write the vision, and make it plain upon tablets, that he may run that readeth it.' (2:2). Then comes the reason it has to be durable: 'For the vision is yet for the appointed time, and it hasteth toward the end, and shall not lie: though it tarry, wait for it; because it will surely come, it will not delay.' (2:3). Two things are held together that usually pull apart. The vision may tarry, and it will not delay. The delay is real from where the reader stands and there is no delay at all from where God stands, because the time was appointed. Waiting in this book is an activity with a date attached to it.
Habakkuk 2:2 · Habakkuk 2:3
Five woes on the empire, and two verses that hold them up
The second half of chapter 2 is a taunt-song of five woes, at 2:6, 2:9, 2:12, 2:15, and 2:19. They fall on plunder, on profiteering that builds a house out of other people's ruin, on a city founded on blood, on the man who gets his neighbour drunk to shame him, and on the idol that has to be woken up. Two verses carry the whole song. The first is the promise that outlasts every empire named in it, 'For the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of Jehovah, as the waters cover the sea.' (2:14). The second ends the argument, 'But Jehovah is in his holy temple: let all the earth keep silence before him.' (2:20). The wood and stone that had to be told to wake up are answered by a God who was never asleep.
Habakkuk 2:14 · Habakkuk 2:19 · Habakkuk 2:20
The God who marched before, marching again
Chapter 3 answers the crisis by remembering. 'God came from Teman, And the Holy One from mount Paran.' (3:3) points south, to Sinai and the wilderness, and the whole chapter replays the exodus in the language of storm and battle: mountains scattered, rivers cleft, the sun and moon standing still, 'That thou didst ride upon thy horses, Upon thy chariots of salvation?' (3:8). The prophet's argument is that the God who did this once is the same God now, and the purpose is stated plainly at 3:13, 'Thou wentest forth for the salvation of thy people, For the salvation of thine anointed'. Habakkuk asks for that God to move again in his own lifetime: 'O Jehovah, revive thy work in the midst of the years; In the midst of the years make it known; In wrath remember mercy.' (3:2).
Habakkuk 3:2 · Habakkuk 3:3 · Habakkuk 3:13
Worship with the barns empty
The book ends where its questions were never answered on the terms they were asked. The invasion is still coming, and the prophet says so: 'I heard, and my body trembled, My lips quivered at the voice; Rottenness entereth into my bones, and I tremble in my place' (3:16). Then he lists everything a farming household in Judah lived on, fig, vine, olive, field, flock, herd, and takes each one away: 'For though the fig-tree shall not flourish, Neither shall fruit be in the vines; The labor of the olive shall fail, And the fields shall yield no food; The flock shall be cut off from the fold, And there shall be no herd in the stalls:' (3:17). The next verse is the point of the book. 'Yet I will rejoice in Jehovah, I will joy in the God of my salvation.' (3:18). The joy has been separated from the harvest and attached to the giver, and 3:19 says what carries a man over that ground: 'Jehovah, the Lord, is my strength'.
Habakkuk 3:16 · Habakkuk 3:17 · Habakkuk 3:18
