The Book of Habakkuk begins like one of the lament psalms, or a cry from the lips of Job:
O Lord, how shall I cry for help,
and thou wilt not hear?
Or cry to thee "Violence!"
and thou wilt not save?
The complaint goes on for several more lines, very direct and high-pitched, so that one is tempted to quote the whole thing—but, as Habukkuk is only three chapters and four pages long, that would soon tend toward reproducing the whole text of the book, and if that's what you want here you go. As one proceeds, it becomes evident that the first half of the book is a dialog: Habukkuk questions, God answers; repeat. It isn't evident that Habukkuk is satisfied with the answers, or that he ought to be. The first answer, 1:5-11, is a promise to send the vicious Chaldeans as agents of God's justice. That is, "Don't worry, I've got the guys for the job, they'll fix things up"—and he (God) describes, in the manner of an admiring HR manager, the ruthless efficiency of his designees.
In the top half of the next and last inning, Habukkuk restates the complaint, perhaps with more vehemence than before:
Thou who art of purer eyes than to behold evil
and canst not look on wrong,
why dost thou look on faithless men,
and art silent when the wicked swallows up
the man more righteous than he?
Does Habukkuk hurdle past God's promised solution, as if it weren't worth discussing? Has time passed and the Chaldean solution proven deficient? I don't know, but God's answer is this time more predictable:
For still the vision awaits its time;
it hastens to the end—it will not lie.
If it seems slow, wait for it;
it will surely come, it will not delay.
Behold, he whose soul is not upright in him shall fail,
but the righteous shall live by his faith.
One recognizes the answer that Job finally received out of the whirlwind. It's not your job to ask such questions. It's your job to be faithful and righteous. Things may now look bad to you, but what do you know? In addition to being righteous and faithful, wait.
The HR manager has mounted a high horse.
The text I'm using—The Oxford Annotated Bible, which I had to buy for a college course about 45 years ago—includes a headnote to all 66 books. I assume these editorial introductions represent something like a consensus of mainline, prestigious divinity-school understanding of the work at hand. The one devoted to Habukkuk concludes:
The author is confronting honestly the profoundly disturbing problem of why a just God is "silent when the wicked swallows up the man more righteous than he" (1.13). To this perennial question the prophet receives an answer which is eternally valid: God is still sovereign, and in his own way at the proper time will deal with the wicked; "but the righteous shall live by his faith" (2.4).
One might timidly advance the notion that there is to this a dose of double think almost comical in its effect. The reason the "answer" is "eternally valid" is that the "proper time" never comes. In other words, the validity of the instruction to be patient terminates only if the burden requiring patience is lifted. For the answer to be eternally valid the burden must also be eternal. Yet God promises to lift it. Yet it never lifts. This it seems is ever and always the result of wrestling with what the editor calls a "profoundly disturbing problem."
That is the first two pages of Habukkuk. There are actually three parts to the four pages. The dialog concerning theodicy ends at 2:5 and is followed by a section of five formulaic "Woes" directed against some unidentified tyrannical nation. The third chapter, called in its first verse a "prayer of Habukkuk," brings the book to a close. Much of the scholarly commentary on the book takes up the question of the relationship between three plainly distinct sections. The consensus is that there is no relationship. The book, according to this view, is a collection of disparate texts. That the three sections belong to different literary forms is the strongest evidence for this conclusion. The "prayer," for example, appears to have been intended for liturgical use and would not be out of place in the psalter. According to the aforementioned headnote, scholarship has also detected in the three sections historical allusions that indicate quite different dates of composition. This raises the question of the identity of Habukkuk and the degree to which he was responsible for any of the work attributed to him in "The Book of Habukkuk." The only references to a Habakkuk in the canonical works of the Old Testament are within the book bearing his name. "Nothing," notes one scholar*, "is known about the prophet outside this book, except in legends which arose at a later time." I wonder whether these later arising "legends" might have resulted in the attribution of written material to a character of legend. It seems that there may or may not have been a Habakkuk, and that, if there was, he could have been responsible for at most a part of the biblical book called "Habakkuk."
*J.P. Hyatt in Peake's Commentary on the Bible
Comments