_THE PROPHET AS SCEPTIC_
HABAKKUK i.—ii. 4
Of the prophet Habakkuk we know nothing that is personal save his
name—to our ears his somewhat odd name. It is the intensive form of a
root which means to caress or embrace. More probably it was given to
him as a child, than afterwards assumed as a symbol of his clinging to
God.[343]
Tradition says that Habakkuk was a priest, the son of Joshua, of the
tribe of Levi, but this is only an inference from the late liturgical
notes to the Psalm which has been appended to his prophecy.[344] All
that we know for certain is that he was a contemporary of Jeremiah,
with a sensitiveness under wrong and impulses to question God which
remind us of Jeremiah; but with a literary power which is quite his
own. We may emphasise the latter, even though we recognise upon his
writing the influence of Isaiah’s.
Habakkuk’s originality, however, is deeper than style. He is the
earliest who is known to us of a new school of religion in Israel. He
is called _prophet_, but at first he does not adopt the attitude which
is characteristic of the prophets. His face is set in an opposite
direction to theirs. They address the nation Israel, on behalf of God:
he rather speaks to God on behalf of Israel. Their task was Israel’s
sin, the proclamation of God’s doom and the offer of His grace to their
penitence. Habakkuk’s task is God Himself, the effort to find out
what He means by permitting tyranny and wrong. They attack the sins,
he is the first to state the problems, of life. To him the prophetic
revelation, the Torah, is complete: it has been codified in Deuteronomy
and enforced by Josiah. Habakkuk’s business is not to add to it but
to ask why it does not work. Why does God suffer wrong to triumph,
so that the Torah is paralysed, and Mishpat, the prophetic _justice_
or _judgment_, comes to nought? The prophets travailed for Israel’s
character—to get the people to love justice till justice prevailed
among them: Habakkuk feels justice cannot prevail in Israel, because of
the great disorder which God permits to fill the world. It is true that
he arrives at a prophetic attitude, and before the end authoritatively
declares God’s will; but he begins by searching for the latter, with
an appreciation of the great obscurity cast over it by the facts of
life. He complains to God, asks questions and expostulates. This is
the beginning of speculation in Israel. It does not go far: it is
satisfied with stating questions _to_ God; it does not, directly at
least, state questions _against_ Him. But Habakkuk at least feels that
revelation is baffled by experience, that the facts of life bewilder a
man who believes in the God whom the prophets have declared to Israel.
As in Zephaniah prophecy begins to exhibit traces of apocalypse, so in
Habakkuk we find it developing the first impulses of speculation.
We have seen that the course of events which troubles Habakkuk
and renders the Torah ineffectual is somewhat obscure. On one
interpretation of these two chapters, that which takes the present
order of their verses as the original, Habakkuk asks why God is silent
in face of the injustice which fills the whole horizon (chap. i. 1-4),
is told to look round among the heathen and see how God is raising up
the Chaldeans (i. 5-11), presumably to punish this injustice (if it be
Israel’s own) or to overthrow it (if vv. 1-4 mean that it is inflicted
on Israel by a foreign power). But the Chaldeans only aggravate the
prophet’s problem; they themselves are a wicked and oppressive people:
how can God suffer them? (i. 12-17). Then come the prophet’s waiting
for an answer (ii. 1) and the answer itself (ii. 2 ff.). Another
interpretation takes the passage about the Chaldeans (i. 5-11) to be
out of place where it now lies, removes it to after chap. ii. 4 as a
part of God’s answer to the prophet’s problem, and leaves the remainder
of chap. i. as the description of the Assyrian oppression of Israel,
baffling the Torah and perplexing the prophet’s faith in a Holy and
Just God.[345] Of these two views the former is, we have seen, somewhat
artificial, and though the latter is by no means proved, the arguments
for it are sufficient to justify us in re-arranging the verses chap.
i.—ii. 4 in accordance with its proposals.
_The Oracle which Habakkuk the Prophet
Received by Vision._[346]
_How long, O Jehovah, have I called and Thou hearest not?
I cry to Thee, Wrong! and Thou sendest no help.
Why make me look upon sorrow,
And fill mine eyes with trouble?
Violence and wrong are before me,
Strife comes and quarrel arises.[347]
So the Law is benumbed, and judgment never gets forth:[348]
For the wicked beleaguers the righteous,
So judgment comes forth perverted._[349]
* * * * *
_Art not Thou of old, Jehovah, my God, my Holy One?...[350]
Purer of eyes than to behold evil,
And that canst not gaze upon trouble!
Why gazest Thou upon traitors,[351]
Art dumb when the wicked swallows him that is
more righteous than he?[352]
Thou hast let men be made[353] like fish of the sea,
Like worms that have no ruler![354]
He lifts the whole of it with his angle;
Draws it in with his net, sweeps it in his drag-net:
So rejoices and exults.
So he sacrifices to his net, and offers incense to his drag-net;
For by them is his portion fat, and his food rich.
Shall he for ever draw his sword,[355]
And ceaselessly, ruthlessly massacre nations?[356]_
_Upon my watch-tower I will stand,
And take my post on the rampart.[357]
I will watch to see what He will say to me,
And what answer I[358] get back to my plea._
_And Jehovah answered me and said:
Write the vision, and make it plain upon tablets,
That he may run who reads it.
For[359] the vision is for a time yet to be fixed,
Yet it hurries[360] to the end, and shall not fail:
Though it linger, wait thou for it;
Coming it shall come, and shall not be behind.[361]
Lo! swollen,[362] not level is his[363] soul within him;
But the righteous shall live by his faithfulness.[364]_
* * * * *
_Look[365] round among the heathen, and look well,
Shudder and be shocked;[366]
For I am[367] about to do a work in your days,
Ye shall not believe it when told.
For, lo, I am about to raise up the Kasdim,[368]
A people the most bitter and the most hasty,
That traverse the breadths of the earth,
To possess dwelling-places not their own.
Awful and terrible are they;
From themselves[369] start their purpose and rising.
Fleeter than leopards their steeds,
Swifter than night-wolves.
Their horsemen leap[370] from afar;
They swoop like the eagle a-haste to devour.
All for wrong do they[371] come;
The set of their faces is forward,[372]
And they sweep up captives like sand.
They—at kings do they scoff,
And princes are sport to them.
They—they laugh at each fortress,
Heap dust up and take it!
Then the wind shifts,[373] and they pass!
But doomed are those whose own strength is their god![374]_
The difficulty of deciding between the various arrangements of the
two chapters of Habakkuk does not, fortunately, prevent us from
appreciating his argument. What he feels throughout (this is obvious,
however you arrange his verses) is the tyranny of a great heathen
power,[375] be it Assyrian, Egyptian or Chaldean. The prophet’s horizon
is filled with wrong:[376] Israel thrown into disorder, revelation
paralysed, justice perverted.[377] But, like Nahum, Habakkuk feels not
for Israel alone. The Tyrant has outraged humanity.[378] He _sweeps
peoples into his net_, and as soon as he empties this, he fills it
again _ceaselessly_, as if there were no just God above. He exults in
his vast cruelty, and has success so unbroken that he worships the very
means of it. In itself such impiety is gross enough, but to a heart
that believes in God it is a problem of exquisite pain. Habakkuk’s is
the burden of the finest faith. He illustrates the great commonplace of
religious doubt, that problems arise and become rigorous in proportion
to the purity and tenderness of a man’s conception of God. It is
not the coarsest but the finest temperaments which are exposed to
scepticism. Every advance in assurance of God or in appreciation of His
character develops new perplexities in face of the facts of experience,
and faith becomes her own most cruel troubler. Habakkuk’s questions
are not due to any cooling of the religious temper in Israel, but are
begotten of the very heat and ardour of prophecy in its encounter with
experience. His tremulousness, for instance, is impossible without the
high knowledge of God’s purity and faithfulness, which older prophets
had achieved in Israel:—
_Art not Thou of old, O LORD, my God, my Holy One,
Purer of eyes than to behold evil,
And incapable of looking upon wrong?_
His despair is that which comes only from eager and persevering habits
of prayer:—
_How long, O LORD, have I called and Thou hearest not!
I cry to Thee of wrong and Thou givest no help!_
His questions, too, are bold with that sense of God’s absolute power,
which flashed so bright in Israel as to blind men’s eyes to all
secondary and intermediate causes. _Thou_, he says,—
_Thou hast made men like fishes of the sea,
Like worms that have no ruler_,
boldly charging the Almighty, in almost the temper of Job himself,
with being the cause of the cruelty inflicted by the unchecked tyrant
upon the nations; _for shall evil happen, and Jehovah not have done
it_?[379] Thus all through we perceive that Habakkuk’s trouble springs
from the central founts of prophecy. This scepticism—if we may venture
to give the name to the first motions in Israel’s mind of that temper
which undoubtedly became scepticism—this scepticism was the inevitable
heritage of prophecy: the stress and pain to which prophecy was forced
by its own strong convictions in face of the facts of experience.
Habakkuk, _the prophet_, as he is called, stood in the direct line of
his order, but just because of that he was the father also of Israel’s
religious doubt.
But a discontent springing from sources so pure was surely the
preparation of its own healing. In a verse of exquisite beauty the
prophet describes the temper in which he trusted for an answer to all
his doubts:—
_On my watch-tower will I stand,
And take up my post on the rampart;
I will watch to see what He says to me,
And what answer I get back to my plea._
This verse is not to be passed over, as if its metaphors were merely
of literary effect. They express rather the moral temper in which
the prophet carries his doubt, or, to use New Testament language,
_the good conscience, which some having put away, concerning faith
have made shipwreck_. Nor is this temper patience only and a certain
elevation of mind, nor only a fixed attention and sincere willingness
to be answered. Through the chosen words there breathes a noble
sense of responsibility. The prophet feels he has a post to hold, a
rampart to guard. He knows the heritage of truth, won by the great
minds of the past; and in a world seething with disorder, he will
take his stand upon that and see what more his God will send him. At
the very least, he will not indolently drift, but feel that he has a
standpoint, however narrow, and bravely hold it. Such has ever been the
attitude of the greatest sceptics—not only, let us repeat, earnestness
and sincerity, but the recognition of duty towards the truth: the
conviction that even the most tossed and troubled minds have somewhere
a ποῦ στῶ appointed of God, and upon it interests human and divine to
defend. Without such a conscience, scepticism, however intellectually
gifted, will avail nothing. Men who drift never discover, never grasp
aught. They are only dazzled by shifting gleams of the truth, only
fretted and broken by experience.
Taking then his stand within the patient temper, but especially
upon the conscience of his great order, the prophet waits for his
answer and the healing of his trouble. The answer comes to him in the
promise of _a Vision_, which, though it seem to linger, will not be
later than the time fixed by God. _A Vision_ is something realised,
experienced—something that will be as actual and present to the
waiting prophet as the cruelty which now fills his sight. Obviously
some series of historical events is meant, by which, in the course of
time, the unjust oppressor of the nations shall be overthrown and the
righteous vindicated. Upon the re-arrangement of the text proposed by
Budde,[380] this series of events is the rise of the Chaldeans, and it
is an argument in favour of his proposal that the promise of _a Vision_
requires some such historical picture to follow it as we find in the
description of the Chaldeans—chap. i. 5-11. This, too, is explicitly
introduced by terms of vision: _See among the nations and look
round.... Yea, behold I am about to raise up the Kasdim._ But before
this Vision is given,[381] and for the uncertain interval of waiting
ere the facts come to pass, the Lord enforces upon His watching servant
the great moral principle that arrogance and tyranny cannot, from the
nature of them, last, and that if the righteous be only patient he will
survive them:—
_Lo, swollen, not level, is his soul within him;
But the righteous shall live by his faithfulness._
We have already seen[382] that the text of the first line of this
couplet is uncertain. Yet the meaning is obvious, partly in the words
themselves, and partly by their implied contrast with the second
line. The soul of the wicked is a radically morbid thing: _inflated_,
_swollen_ (unless we should read _perverted_, which more plainly means
the same thing[383]), not _level_, not natural and normal. In the
nature of things it cannot endure. _But the righteous shall live by
his faithfulness._ This word, wrongly translated _faith_ by the Greek
and other versions, is concentrated by Paul in his repeated quotation
from the Greek[384] upon that single act of faith by which the sinner
secures forgiveness and justification. With Habakkuk it is a wider
term. _’Emunah_,[385] from a verb meaning originally to be firm, is
used in the Old Testament in the physical sense of steadfastness.
So it is applied to the arms of Moses held up by Aaron and Hur over
the battle with Amalek: _they were steadiness till the going down of
the sun_.[386] It is also used of the faithful discharge of public
office,[387] and of fidelity as between man and wife.[388] It is also
faithful testimony,[389] equity in judgment,[390] truth in speech,[391]
and sincerity or honest dealing.[392] Of course it has faith in God
as its secret—the verb from which it is derived is the regular Hebrew
term to believe—but it is rather the temper which faith produces of
endurance, steadfastness, integrity. Let the righteous, however baffled
his faith be by experience, hold on in loyalty to God and duty, and he
shall live. Though St. Paul, as we have said, used the Greek rendering
of _faith_ for the enforcement of trust in God’s mercy through
Jesus Christ as the secret of forgiveness and life, it is rather to
Habakkuk’s wider intention of patience and fidelity that the author
of the Epistle to the Hebrews returns in his fuller quotation of the
verse: _For yet a little while and He that shall come will come and
will not tarry; now the just shall live by faith, but if he draw back
My soul shall have no pleasure in him._[393]
Such then is the tenor of the passage. In face of experience that
baffles faith, the duty of Israel is patience in loyalty to God.
In this the nascent scepticism of Israel received its first great
commandment, and this it never forsook. Intellectual questions arose,
of which Habakkuk’s were but the faintest foreboding—questions
concerning not only the mission and destiny of the nation, but the
very foundation of justice and the character of God Himself. Yet
did no sceptic, however bold and however provoked, forsake his
_faithfulness_. Even Job, when most audaciously arraigning the God of
his experience, turned from Him to God as in his heart of hearts he
believed He must be, experience notwithstanding. Even the Preacher,
amid the aimless flux and drift which he finds in the universe, holds
to the conclusion of the whole matter in a command, which better
than any other defines the contents of the _faithfulness_ enforced
by Habakkuk: _Fear God and keep His commandments, for this is the
whole of man._ It has been the same with the great mass of the race.
Repeatedly disappointed of their hopes, and crushed for ages beneath
an intolerable tyranny, have they not exhibited the same heroic temper
with which their first great questioner was endowed? Endurance—this
above all others has been the quality of Israel: _though He slay me,
yet will I trust Him_. And, therefore, as Paul’s adaptation, _The just
shall live by faith_, has become the motto of evangelical Christianity,
so we may say that Habakkuk’s original of it has been the motto and the
fame of Judaism: _The righteous shall live by his faithfulness._
FOOTNOTES:
[343] חֲבַקּוּק (the Greek Ἁμβακουμ, LXX. version of the title of this
book, and again the inscription to _Bel and the Dragon_, suggests the
pointing חַבַּקוּק; Epiph., _De Vitis Proph._—see next note—spells it
Ἁββακουμ), from חבק, _to embrace_. Jerome: “He is called ‘embrace’
either because of his love to the Lord, or because he wrestles with
God.” Luther: “Habakkuk means one who comforts and holds up his people
as one embraces a weeping person.”
[344] See above, pp. 126 ff. The title to the Greek version of _Bel
and the Dragon_ bears that the latter was taken from the prophecy of
Hambakoum, son of Jesus, of the tribe of Levi. Further details are
offered in the _De Vitis Prophetarum_ of (Pseud-) Epiphanius, _Epiph.
Opera_, ed. Paris, 1622, Vol. II., p. 147, according to which Habakkuk
belonged to Βεθζοχηρ, which is probably Βεθζαχαριας of 1 Macc. vi. 32,
the modern Beit-Zakaryeh, a little to the north of Hebron, and placed
by this notice, as Nahum’s Elkosh is placed, in the tribe of Simeon.
His grave was shown in the neighbouring Keilah. The notice further
alleges that when Nebuchadrezzar came up to Jerusalem Habakkuk fled to
Ostracine, where he travelled in the country of the Ishmaelites; but he
returned after the fall of Jerusalem, and died in 538, two years before
the return of the exiles. _Bel and the Dragon_ tells an extraordinary
story of his miraculous carriage of food to Daniel in the lions’ den
soon after Cyrus had taken Babylon.
[345] See above, pp. 119 ff.
[346] Heb. _saw_.
[347] Text uncertain. Perhaps we should read, _Why make me look upon
sorrow and trouble? why fill mine eyes with violence and wrong? Strife
is come before me, and quarrel arises_.
[348] _Never gets away_, to use a colloquial expression.
[349] Here vv. 5-11 come in the original.
[350] Ver. 12_b_: _We shall not die_ (many Jewish authorities read
_Thou shalt not die_). _O Jehovah, for judgment hast Thou set him, and,
O my Rock, for punishment hast Thou appointed him._
[351] Wellhausen: _on the robbery of robbers_.
[352] LXX. _devoureth the righteous_.
[353] Literally _Thou hast made men_.
[354] Wellhausen: cf. Jer. xviii. 1, xix. 1.
[355] So Giesebrecht (see above, p. 119, n. 318), reading העולם יריק
חרבו for העל־כן יריק חרמו, _shall he therefore empty his net?_
[356] Wellhausen, reading יהרג for להרג: _should he therefore be
emptying his net continually, and slaughtering the nations without
pity?_
[357] מצור. But Wellhausen takes it as from נצר and = _ward_ or
_watch-tower_. So Nowack.
[358] So Heb. and LXX.; but Syr. _he_: so Wellhausen, _what answer He
returns to my plea_.
[359] Bredenkamp (_Stud. u. Krit._, 1889, pp. 161 ff.) suggests that
the writing on the tablets begins here and goes on to ver. 5_a_. Budde
(_Z.A.T.W._, 1889, pp. 155 f.) takes the כי which opens it as simply
equivalent to the Greek ὅτι, introducing, like our marks of quotation,
the writing itself.
[360] וְיָפֵחַ: cf. Psalm xxvii. 12. Bredenkamp emends to וְיִפְרַח.
[361] _Not be late_, or past its fixed time.
[362] So literally the Heb. עֻפְּלָה, i.e. _arrogant_, _false_: cf.
the colloquial expression _swollen-head_ = conceit, as opposed to
level-headed. Bredenkamp, _Stud. u. Krit._, 1889, 121, reads הַנֶעֱלָף
for הִנֵּה עֻפְּלָה. Wellhausen suggests הִנֵּה הֶעַוָל, _Lo, the
sinner_, in contrast to צדיק of next clause. Nowack prefers this.
[363] LXX. wrongly _my_.
[364] LXX. πίδτις, _faith_, and so in N. T.
[365] Chap. i. 5-11.
[366] So to bring out the assonance, reading הִתְמַהְמְהוּ וּתִמָהוּ.
[367] So LXX.
[368] Or Chaldeans; on the name and people see above, p. 19.
[369] Heb. singular.
[370] Omit ופרשיו (evidently a dittography) and the lame יבאו which
is omitted by LXX. and was probably inserted to afford a verb for the
second פרשיו.
[371] Heb. sing., and so in all the clauses here except the next.
[372] A problematical rendering. מגמה is found only here, and probably
means _direction_. Hitzig translates _desire_, _effort_, _striving_.
קדימה, _towards the front_ or _forward_; but elsewhere it means only
_eastward_: קדים, _the east wind_. Cf. Judg. v. 21, נחל קדומים נחל
קישון, _a river of spates or rushes is the river Kishon_ (_Hist.
Geog._, p. 395). Perhaps we should change פניהים to a singular suffix,
as in the clauses before and after, and this would leave מ to form with
קדימה a participle from הקדים (cf. Amos ix. 10).
[373] Or _their spirit changes_, or _they change like the wind_
(Wellhausen suggests כרוח). Grätz reads כֺּחַ and יַחֲלִיף, _he renews
his strength_.
[374] Von Orelli. For אשׁם Wellhausen proposes וְיָשִׂם, _and sets_.
[375] _The wicked_ of chap. i. 4 must, as we have seen, be the same as
_the wicked_ of chap. i. 13—a heathen oppressor of _the righteous_,
_i.e._ the people of God.
[376] i. 3.
[377] i. 4.
[378] i. 13-17.
[379] Amos iii. 6. See Vol. I., p. 90.
[380] See above, pp. 119 ff.
[381] Its proper place in Budde’s re-arrangement is after chap. ii. 4.
[382] Above, p. 134, n. 362.
[383] עֻקְּלָה instead of עֻפְּלָה.
[384] Rom. i. 17; Gal. iii. 11.
[385] אֱמוּנָה.
[386] Exod. xvii. 12.
[387] 2 Chron. xix. 9.
[388] Hosea ii. 22 (Heb.).
[389] Prov. xiv. 5.
[390] Isa. xi. 5.
[391] Prov. xii. 17: cf. Jer. ix. 2.
[392] Prov. xii. 22, xxviii. 30.
[393] Heb. x. 37, 38.