Habakkuk: How Long?

At a Glance

Who wrote it: Habakkuk. Nothing is known about him except his book.

When: About 605 to 597 BC, as Babylon rose to power.

Where it fits: Habakkuk spoke in the last years of the kingdom of Judah, probably under King Jehoiakim (2 Kings 23:36–24:7), as Babylon rose to power. Babylon destroyed Jerusalem in 586 BC.

Where I quote it: Never directly. Paul built his letters to the Romans and the Galatians on one of its lines (Romans 1:17; Galatians 3:11; Habakkuk 2:4).

If you only read three chapters: It has three. Read all of it.

Words to Know

Chaldeans — the Babylonians, the new empire that would destroy Jerusalem.

Faith — in Hebrew emunah, which means faithfulness, holding steady, as much as believing.

Woe — a cry of grief and warning, Alas for you.

Pesher — a kind of commentary found among the Dead Sea Scrolls that reads a prophet’s words as being about the reader’s own day.

The Book in Brief

Habakkuk is a short book of prophecy in three chapters. Most of it is a conversation between the prophet and God, not a message to the people. The book tells nothing about Habakkuk’s life except that he was a prophet.

In chapter 1, Habakkuk complains that he cries out about violence and injustice, and God does not answer. God replies that he is raising up the Chaldeans, the Babylonians, a fierce nation that sweeps up whole peoples. Habakkuk complains again. How can a holy God stay silent while the wicked swallow up people more righteous than they are?

In chapter 2, he stands at his watchpost and waits. God tells him to write the vision plainly on tablets, because it will come at its appointed time. The proud will not last, but the righteous will live by staying faithful. Five woes follow, against those who grab what is not theirs, build by bloodshed, shame their neighbors and trust in idols.

Chapter 3 is a prayer set to music. Habakkuk pictures God coming in power to save his people, trembles as he waits for the invaders, and ends by rejoicing in God even if crops and flocks fail.

Habakkuk does not start by speaking for God. He starts by complaining to God.

LORD, how long will I cry, and you will not hear? I cry out to you “Violence!” and will you not save? … Therefore the law is paralyzed, and justice never prevails; for the wicked surround the righteous; therefore justice comes out perverted (Habakkuk 1:2–4).

That is a prayer. It is in my scriptures. You are allowed to pray it.

The answer is worse

God answers: I am raising up the Chaldeans, the Babylonians, that bitter and hasty nation, to punish Judah (Habakkuk 1:6).

That is no comfort. Habakkuk protests again. You who have purer eyes than to see evil … why do you tolerate those who deal treacherously, and keep silent when the wicked swallows up the man who is more righteous than he? (Habakkuk 1:13). How can God use a nation worse than Judah to punish Judah?

Then he climbs his watchtower to wait for an answer (Habakkuk 2:1).

Go deeperWho the Chaldeans were

The Chaldeans were a people of southern Mesopotamia, in what is now southern Iraq. For a long time they lived in the shadow of Assyria. Then, in 626 BC, a Chaldean named Nabopolassar made himself king of Babylon and threw off Assyrian rule. With the Medes, from what is now Iran, he destroyed the Assyrian capital, Nineveh, in 612 BC.¹

The Babylonians kept a record of each year’s events on clay tablets, now called the Babylonian Chronicles. One of them, now in the British Museum, covers the last year of Nabopolassar and the first years of his son, Nebuchadnezzar. It says that in 605 BC the crown prince crossed the Euphrates and beat the Egyptian army at Carchemish. Jeremiah dates the same battle to the fourth year of King Jehoiakim (Jeremiah 46:2). That summer Nabopolassar died, and Nebuchadnezzar went home to Babylon to take the throne.²

That is the world of Habakkuk’s first chapter. A nation nobody in Judah had feared a generation earlier had become, within a few years, the greatest power in the region. Jehoiakim became Nebuchadnezzar’s servant for three years, and then rebelled (2 Kings 24:1).

The same tablet records what came next. In Nebuchadnezzar’s seventh year, it says, he marched west, camped against the city of Judah, and on the second day of the month Adar, in March 597 BC, he captured the city and seized its king. Then he appointed a king of his own choice.² The Bible tells the same story: the young king Jehoiachin carried off to Babylon, and his uncle Zedekiah made king in his place (2 Kings 24:10–17). The tablet was first published in 1956, and it gave the first fall of Jerusalem an exact date.

Write it plainly

The answer comes: Write the vision, and make it plain on tablets, that he who runs may read it. For the vision is yet for the appointed time … Though it takes time, wait for it; because it will surely come (Habakkuk 2:2–3).

Then this:

Behold, his soul is puffed up. It is not upright in him, but the righteous will live by his faith (Habakkuk 2:4).

The Hebrew word is emunah, faithfulness. The proud swell up and fall. The righteous hold steady and live.

One line, two thousand years later

My follower Paul quoted that line as the center of his letter to the Romans: But the righteous shall live by faith (Romans 1:17).

Fifteen hundred years after Paul, a monk named Martin Luther was struggling with that verse in Romans. When he finally understood it, he said, it was as if the gates of paradise opened.³ That insight became the heart of the Protestant Reformation.

A line from a three-chapter book, written by a prophet nobody knows anything about, while waiting on a watchtower for God to answer him, became the center of the argument that split the Western church in two.

Go deeperOne line in Hebrew, in Greek and in the Talmud

Habakkuk’s line has had a long life, and it changed a little each time it was translated.

In Hebrew, the righteous person lives by his faithfulness, by holding steady. The Greek translation of the scriptures, made by Jews in Egypt in the centuries before me and used by my followers, reads by my faithfulness. In that version God is speaking of his own faithfulness, not the righteous person’s.⁴ Paul, quoting it, left the little word out altogether: The righteous will live by faith (Galatians 3:11).

The Greek changed the verse before it too. In Hebrew, it is the vision that will come: wait for it; because it will surely come (Habakkuk 2:3). In the Greek, the vision can be read as a person: he who is coming will come.⁴ The letter to the Hebrews quotes the Greek, runs the two verses together, and puts the last two lines in reverse order: In a very little while, he who comes will come, and will not wait. But the righteous will live by faith. If he shrinks back, my soul has no pleasure in him (Hebrews 10:37–38). For Hebrews, the one who is coming is me.

My own people kept the line too. In the Talmud, the great collection of rabbinic teaching, a teacher named Rabbi Simlai says that Moses was given 613 commandments. The discussion then follows the prophets who summed them up in fewer and fewer: David in eleven (Psalm 15), Isaiah in six, Micah in three (Micah 6:8), Isaiah again in two. It ends with Habakkuk, who stood them all on one: the righteous will live by his faith (Habakkuk 2:4).⁵

So the same few words that Paul and Luther made the center of their faith were, for the rabbis, the whole Law in a single sentence.

The woes

Then Habakkuk pronounces five woes against the empire. Here is the first:

Woe to him who increases that which is not his, and who enriches himself by extortion! … Won’t your debtors rise up suddenly, and wake up those who make you tremble, and you will be their victim? (Habakkuk 2:6–7).

Woe to him who gets an evil gain for his house (Habakkuk 2:9).

Woe to him who builds a town with blood (Habakkuk 2:12).

And in the middle of them: For the stone will cry out of the wall (Habakkuk 2:11).

When I rode into Jerusalem and the crowd was shouting, some Pharisees told me to make them stop. I said, I tell you that if these were silent, the stones would cry out (Luke 19:40).

Read as the news

Among the Dead Sea Scrolls is a commentary on the first two chapters of Habakkuk, written by the community at Qumran in the century before me. It goes line by line and explains each one as being about their own day: the Kittim, who are almost certainly the Romans, a Wicked Priest in Jerusalem, and their own Teacher of Righteousness.⁶

That is how many of my people read the prophets in my time. Not as ancient history but as the news. Remember that when you read how my followers read the prophets about me.

Though the fig tree doesn’t flourish

Habakkuk ends with a song, complete with notes for the choir leader. Its last lines are some of the bravest in the scriptures:

For though the fig tree doesn’t flourish, nor fruit be in the vines; the labor of the olive fails, the fields yield no food; the flocks are cut off from the fold, and there is no herd in the stalls: yet I will rejoice in the LORD. I will be joyful in the God of my salvation! (Habakkuk 3:17–18).

He has not gotten his answer. The Babylonians are still coming. Everything may fail. He will hold steady anyway.

That is what the righteous will live by his faith means.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Habakkuk 1:2–4, then Habakkuk 3:17–18.

You will find: a prophet who begins by accusing God of not listening, and ends rejoicing with nothing in the fields.

Then read Romans 1:17.

The Short Version

• Habakkuk begins by complaining to God: how long?
• God’s answer is that Babylon is coming, which makes the question worse.
• “The righteous will live by his faith” became the center of Paul’s letters and of Luther’s Reformation.
• He cries woe on those who increase that which is not theirs. The stone will cry out of the wall.
• He ends: though the fig tree doesn’t flourish, yet I will rejoice.