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Begin Typing VigilThe Book of Habakkuk opens with a complaint regarding the oppressions of the wicked (1:2-4), and foretells the coming of the Chaldeans as ministers of Divine justice (1:5-11); then with startling abruptness the Chaldeans are denounced as the oppressors of the righteous (1:12-17), and, after renewed complaint to Yahweh, answered by the promise of a speedy end to the trouble (2:1-4), a series of Woes is hurled at their heads (2:5-20), the book closing with a splendid poetical description of Yahweh's march from Sinai to help His people (ch. 3).
Various efforts have been made to force these inharmonious elements into unity: the denial of the predictive character of 1:5-11 (Davidson, Stonehouse); the placing of those verses after 2:4, the oppressors being then identified with the Assyrians (Budde) or the Egyptians (G. A. Smith); and Duhm's remarkable tour de force, the alteration of כַּשְׂדִּים to כִּתִּים (the Cyprians or Greeks), the prophecy being thus directed against Alexander the Great. Recognising the arbitrary nature of all such attempts, Wellhausen and other scholars regard 1:5-11 as a fragment of an older prophecy woven into the texture of Habakkuk, while Marti resolves the book into four separate congeries of texts. The present writer accepts the theory of an older prophecy; he is inclined, however, to extend this prophecy to cover the whole of 1:2-11, as well as the nucleus of the Woes in ch. 2 (the denunciation of avarice, cruelty, and drunkenness in general), and to find in its author a like-minded contemporary of Jeremiah (c. 608 B.C.). The genuine prophecy of Habakkuk is then most naturally assigned to the middle of the exile (560-550), an assumption borne out to a certain extent by the Hebrew tradition which associates Habakkuk with Daniel (cf. Bel and the Dragon), as well as the Babylonian complexion of the name, which has been identified as that of a garden plant. The Prayer is an independent eschatological Psalm, excerpted from some late Jewish collection.
With Habakkuk we enter still more decisively the pathway of question and complaint already struck by Jeremiah. For this reason he has been called 'the prophet as sceptic' (G. A. Smith). But, whatever doubts assail him, faith remains the dominant note of his prophecy. In the NT his great words (2:4) are cited as the bed-rock of Christian life; he is equally the father of Protestant freedom.
The Major prophets are here grouped with 'the Twelve' prophets, forming the core of the Nevi'im.