Thing

Book of Habakkuk

The eighth of the Hebrew Bible's Minor Prophets — three short chapters that press God on why the wicked prosper, and answer that the righteous shall live by his faithfulness.

The Book of Habakkuk is the eighth of the twelve Minor Prophets in the Hebrew Bible — three short chapters built, almost uniquely among the prophets, around a complaint and the answer it forces out of God. Of the prophet himself almost nothing is fixed: no genealogy, no city, no king’s reign to anchor him, only the name, which the book attaches to a series of oracles and a closing prayer set to music. Later tradition would crowd the blank with stories — a Greek addition to the Book of Daniel carries the prophet by an angel to feed the imprisoned Daniel in the lion’s den, and a shrine at Tuyserkan in western Iran is shown as his tomb — but the book itself gives the reader a voice and a quarrel, and withholds the man.

Watercolor of the prophet Habakkuk as a bearded, robed figure holding a scroll. The Prophet Habakkuk, gouache by James Tissot, c. 1896–1902 (The Jewish Museum, New York) — James Tissot, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Among the twelve books gathered as the Minor Prophets — minor only in length, counted as a single scroll in the Hebrew reckoning, the Book of the Twelve — it sits between Nahum and Zephaniah, in the cluster usually read against the last Assyrian decades and the first Babylonian ones. Where Joel turns a locust plague into the Day of the Lord and Malachi closes the Twelve on the promise of a coming messenger, Habakkuk is the dissenting voice of the collection, the one that makes the theodicy the others assume into its express subject.

The inverted shape

What sets the work apart from its neighbors is the direction of its address. Nahum turns on Nineveh, Micah on a corrupt Jerusalem, Hosea on an unfaithful people — the prophet ordinarily carries God’s word to the nation. Habakkuk reverses the current. He arraigns God directly. The first chapter opens not with a vision but with a grievance, pitched as a legal complaint: how long must violence go uncried-back, why does the law go slack and justice come out crooked while the wicked hem in the righteous. It is the oldest of religious questions — the prospering of the unjust under a God who is supposed to see — set not as a theory but as an accusation lodged against heaven, and the book’s spine is the prophet’s refusal to let it drop.

The answer, when it comes, is harder than the question. God is raising up the Chaldeans — “that bitter and hasty nation” in the older English versions, the Babylonians on the march out of the lower Euphrates — as the very instrument of the judgment Habakkuk has been demanding. They come for violence; their horses are swifter than leopards; they scoop up captives like sand and laugh at kings; their strength is their god. The cure is more terrible than the disease, and the prophet says so. His second complaint is sharper than his first: how can a God too pure to look on wrong hold his peace while a people more wicked still swallows up one more righteous than itself. He posts himself on his watchtower, in the book’s most deliberate image, to wait for the reply — the prophet not as mouthpiece but as sentinel, standing his ground until God answers the charge.

The vision and the woes

The reply that opens the second chapter is the answer the book is remembered for. The vision is to be written plain on tablets, so that a runner can read it; it keeps an appointed time and presses toward its end and does not lie; though it tarry, wait for it. Then the hinge: the proud, the puffed-up soul, is not upright within — but the just shall live by his faith. The Hebrew word the older translations render as faith is emunah, and it sits nearer to steadfastness, firmness, reliability than to creedal belief; the root is the one behind amen. To live by emunah is to hold fast, to keep faith under a delay that has not yet been explained — the patience of the watchman pressed into a single line. The distance between that and the doctrinal sense of faith the verse would later be made to carry is the whole afterlife of the sentence, and the seam where two religions read the same words apart.

After the vision come the woes — five of them, a chanted catalog of judgment pronounced not by God in the first instance but as a taunt-song the conquered peoples will one day raise over the conqueror. Woe to the one who heaps up what is not his and loads himself with pledges; woe to the one who builds a town with blood and founds a city on iniquity; woe to the one who makes his neighbors drink to look on their shame; woe to the maker of idols of wood and stone, overlaid with gold, in which there is no breath, that cannot teach. The plundered will plunder; the cup in the Lord’s right hand will come round. The catalog closes on the dumbness of the idols and the answering hush of the whole earth before the living God in his holy temple — a turn from the clamor of empire to silence.

The architecture of the answer is as important as its content. God does not refute the complaint or dissolve the injustice; he reframes its tempo. The wrong stands, the judgment is coming, and the appointed time is not yet — so the proof of righteousness is the capacity to wait without letting go. The watchman on his tower, the vision written large for a runner, the promise that it will not lie though it tarry: these are not consolations that the world is already just, but instructions for holding a position inside a delay. That is the burden the central verse names, and it is why the book has been heard, across very different traditions, as a charter for keeping faith when the evidence has not yet come in.

The third chapter

The third chapter is a thing apart: a prayer, headed as the prophet’s and marked upon Shigionoth — a musical or liturgical term of uncertain force — and punctuated by Selah and a closing rubric to the chief singer on stringed instruments. Its matter is a theophany. God comes from Teman, the Holy One from Mount Paran, out of the old southern desert country where the storm-god of the early Hebrew poems appears; his glory covers the heavens, pestilence goes before him, he stands and measures the earth, the everlasting mountains scatter, the sun and moon stand still in their habitation, he treads the sea with his horses. It is among the grandest storm-and-earthquake descents in the Bible, kin in idiom to the war-poem of Deuteronomy 33 and to the Psalter’s psalms of the divine warrior. It ends not in triumph but in a tremble and a vow: though the fig tree does not blossom and there is no herd in the stall, the prophet will yet rejoice in the God of his salvation.

Whether this chapter was always part of the book is among the standing questions of its study. Its psalm-like form, its musical headings and the Selah markings, its independent circulation — and the fact that the Habakkuk commentary among the Dead Sea Scrolls treats only the first two chapters — have led many to read it as an older hymn drawn in to close the book. Others take the three chapters as one deliberate movement: complaint, answer, and the answered prophet’s prayer, the theophany supplying in vision the deliverance the argument had demanded. The book withholds the casting vote, and the debate runs unresolved through the commentaries.

Setting and date

The setting is usually placed in the late seventh century BCE, on the eve of Babylon’s rise, though the dating rests on internal cues rather than any fixed marker. The naming of the Chaldeans as a power newly to be reckoned with points to the years after Assyria’s fall — Nineveh was taken in 612 BCE — and before Babylon’s grip on Judah closed; the city would fall to Nebuchadnezzar’s siege in 587. Within that window scholars have divided: some, following Karl Budde and Otto Eissfeldt, look to the later reign of Josiah; others, including W. F. Albright and Gerhard von Rad, to the reign of Jehoiakim; and a line going back to Julius Wellhausen treats parts of the book as earlier material worked over by a later hand, with an exilic compiler. What the disputes share is the absence of a regnal date or a datable event in the text itself: Habakkuk fixes itself by atmosphere — a great empire about to break over a small kingdom — and the rest is inference.

The afterlife of a single verse

One line carried the book far past its own horizon. The Greek translators of the Septuagint rendered Habakkuk 2:4 with ek pisteos — from faith — a construction that occurs nowhere else in their version, and it is in something close to that wording that Paul takes it up. He quotes it twice, in his letter to the Romans and in Galatians, and reads it as a charter: the righteous person lives by faith, justified apart from the works of the law. The same verse stands a third time in the Letter to the Hebrews, there bent toward endurance — the just shall live by faith, and the one who shrinks back is not God’s delight. Where the Hebrew emunah leans toward the faithfulness of the righteous person held steady under delay, the Pauline reading leans toward faith as the ground of a right standing before God; the gap between the two senses has occupied interpreters ever since, and the role the Septuagint’s ek pisteos plays in bridging them is itself a sustained question of the scholarship. Fifteen centuries later the verse became load-bearing again. It is one of the sentences over which Martin Luther read his way to justification by faith alone, and through him a watchword of the Reformation — a three-word clause out of an obscure prophet made into a hinge of Western Christianity.

Habakkuk read as cipher

The verse had a still earlier and stranger afterlife. Among the Dead Sea Scrolls, in the first cave found at Qumran in 1947, was a nearly intact leather scroll of thirteen columns in a Herodian hand — a running commentary on Habakkuk’s first two chapters, known as the Pesher Habakkuk. It proceeds by a method the community made its signature: a clause of the prophet is copied, then unlocked with the formula pishro — its interpretation is — and referred not to the prophet’s Chaldeans but to the commentator’s own present. The woes against the violent nation become oracles about the Kittim — most read this as the Romans — and about the community’s enemies at home: a figure called the Wicked Priest, and over against him the Teacher of Righteousness, the community’s founder, to whom God is said to have made known all the mysteries of the words of his servants the prophets. Habakkuk’s “the just shall live by his faith” is glossed there too, applied to those in the house of Judah whom God will deliver for their toil and their faithfulness to the Teacher. The premise is that the prophets wrote of an end they themselves did not know, sealed until a later reader to whom the meaning is given — scripture as a coded message addressed past its own age to the interpreter’s. It is the earliest sustained witness to a way of reading that would recur across Jewish and Christian apocalyptic tradition, the conviction that the old words speak, in cipher, of now.

A long, dark leather scroll covered in columns of square Hebrew script, with damaged lower edges. The Commentary on Habakkuk (1QpHab), a Herodian-era Dead Sea Scroll from Qumran Cave 1, now in the Israel Museum, Jerusalem — Israel Museum / Google Art Project, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The text and its students

The Pesher scroll matters textually as well as historically: because it copies the prophetic clauses it comments on, it preserves a Hebrew text of Habakkuk a thousand years older than the medieval Masoretic manuscripts, and its agreements and divergences from them are a standing exhibit in the study of how the Hebrew Bible was transmitted. The scroll’s columns, paleography, and theological language are laid out in the published editions and the museum record of the Habakkuk Commentary. The book’s own modern study turns on a small set of cruxes — the date, the unity of the third chapter, the force of emunah — and the standard scholarly handbooks, from the treatments collected around Richard Coggins’s work to the survey accounts of the Book of Habakkuk, array the positions without forcing a verdict. The verse at the book’s center has its own literature: the question of whether Habakkuk 2:4 should be heard as faith or faithfulness, and how the Greek translators’ ek pisteos set the stage for its later use, is argued in detail in Robert Haak’s study of the verse and the Septuagint. Across the Second Temple frame, the same short text is at once a prophetic complaint, a Qumran cipher, and a Pauline proof — three readings of three chapters, none of them the prophet’s last word on himself.

The book thus travels in more than one register at once. As a document it is a brief, unusually personal protest against the silence of God in a violent age — a prophet who stops preaching to the people and turns to cross-examine heaven. As a quoted line it became one of the load-bearing sentences of Western religion, read in senses its author is unlikely to have intended.