Habakkuk1chapter 1

Josiah's reforms had been the last good thing to happen to Judah, and they died with him at Megiddo in 609 BC. His son Jehoiakim was installed by Egypt, then had to switch loyalty to Babylon, and Jeremiah accuses him of building himself a paneled palace with unpaid labor. Habakkuk's opening complaint about violence, strife, and a paralyzed law matches that reign exactly.

In 605 BC Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the Egyptian army at Carchemish and the whole corridor changed hands. The Chaldeans — the Babylonian ruling group — went from a rebel province of Assyria to the great power of the world in about twenty years.

God's answer to Habakkuk's first complaint is the shock of the chapter: I am raising up the Chaldeans, that bitter and hasty nation. The description that follows is a portrait of a professional army — horses swifter than leopards, faces set to advance, gathering captives like sand, scoffing at kings, heaping up earth ramps to take fortified cities. Siege ramps are exactly what Babylon built, and one survives at Lachish from an earlier Assyrian siege.

So Habakkuk asks the harder question. He can accept judgment; what he cannot accept is that God would use a nation more wicked than Judah to do it. "Wherefore lookest thou upon them that deal treacherously, and holdest thy tongue when the wicked devoureth the man that is more righteous than he?"

This book is unusual for a prophet: it is not addressed to the people at all. It is an argument with God, written down.