Habakkuk 3: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

This chapter is a prayer of Habakkuk, written as a song with musical directions at the start and the end. It pictures God coming from the south in blazing power, shaking mountains, rivers and sea while the sun and moon stand still in their places, and marching out to rescue his people and crush their enemy. The prophet says the report left him shaking, and that he will wait quietly for the day of trouble to fall on the nation that invades. He closes by saying that even if every crop and herd fails, he will still rejoice in the LORD, who is his strength.

Claim by Claim

1. 3:1
   • This is a prayer of Habakkuk.
   • Habakkuk is a prophet.
   • The prayer is set to Shigionoth.
2. 3:2
   • The speaker addresses the LORD.
   • The speaker says he has heard the report of the LORD.
   • The speaker says he was afraid.
   • The speaker asks the LORD to revive his work in the midst of the years.
   • The speaker asks the LORD to make it known in the midst of the years.
   • The speaker asks the LORD to remember mercy in wrath.
3. 3:3
   • God came from Teman.
   • The Holy One came from Mount Paran.
   • The notation Selah stands here.
   • His splendor covered the heavens.
   • The earth was full of his praise.
4. 3:4
   • His brightness was like the light.
   • Rays, spoken of as horns, came out of his hand.
   • In that place was the hiding of his power.
5. 3:5
   • Pestilence went before him.
   • A burning plague went out at his feet.
6. 3:6
   • He stood.
   • He measured the earth.
   • He looked.
   • He made the nations tremble.
   • The ancient mountains were shattered.
   • The everlasting hills bowed down.
   • His ways are everlasting.
7. 3:7
   • The speaker saw the tents of Cushan in affliction.
   • The curtains of the land of Midian trembled.
8. 3:8
   • It is asked whether the LORD was angry against the rivers.
   • It is asked whether his anger was against the rivers.
   • It is asked whether his wrath was against the sea.
   • He rode upon his horses.
   • His chariots are chariots of salvation.
9. 3:9
   • His bow was uncovered and made bare.
   • The next words are obscure: they speak of oaths, of rods or tribes, and of a word or utterance, and it is not clear how they join together.
   • The notation Selah stands here.
   • He split the earth with rivers.
10. 3:10
    • The mountains saw him.
    • The mountains writhed.
    • A downpour of water passed by.
    • The deep gave forth its voice.
    • The deep lifted its hands on high.
11. 3:11
    • The sun and the moon stood still in their dwelling.
    • They moved at the light of his arrows.
    • They moved at the brightness of his flashing spear.
12. 3:12
    • He marched through the earth in indignation.
    • He threshed the nations in anger.
13. 3:13
    • He went forth for the salvation of his people.
    • He went forth for the salvation of his anointed one.
    • He struck the head from the house of the wicked.
    • He laid bare the foundation up to the neck.
    • The notation Selah stands here.
14. 3:14
    • He pierced with his own staves the head of his warriors, the word for them being uncertain and rendered as his villages.
    • They stormed out to scatter the speaker.
    • Their rejoicing was like that of one about to devour the poor in secret.
15. 3:15
    • He trod the sea with his horses.
    • He churned the heap of many waters.
16. 3:16
    • The speaker heard.
    • The speaker's belly trembled.
    • The speaker's lips quivered at the sound.
    • Rottenness entered the speaker's bones.
    • The speaker trembled where he stood.
    • The speaker will wait quietly for the day of trouble.
    • The day of trouble will come up against the people that attacks.
17. 3:17
    • The fig tree will not blossom.
    • There will be no fruit on the vines.
    • The yield of the olive will fail.
    • The fields will produce no food.
    • The flock will be cut off from the fold.
    • There will be no herd in the stalls.
18. 3:18
    • The speaker will nevertheless exult in the LORD.
    • The speaker will rejoice in the God of his salvation.
19. 3:19
    • The Lord GOD is the speaker's strength.
    • He makes the speaker's feet like the feet of deer.
    • He makes the speaker walk upon his high places.
    • The piece is directed to the chief musician.
    • The piece is to be performed with stringed instruments.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

3:1

Shigionoth is a Hebrew musical term whose meaning is lost; its singular form, shiggaion, heads Psalm 7. This line works like the heading of a psalm, telling a musician how the poem was to be performed. The chapter is framed as a song, with this heading at the front and a closing performance instruction in verse 19.

3:2

LORD printed in capitals stands for the personal name of Israel's God, four Hebrew consonants usually written Yahweh. Jewish readers came to avoid saying it aloud, substituting the word for "my Lord," and English Bibles preserve that custom by printing LORD. The "report" is most likely the answer Habakkuk was given in the first two chapters. "In our own time" is literally "in the midst of the years," which may mean within our lifetime or in the middle of the present age; translators divide over it.

3:3

Teman was a district (or town) of Edom, southeast of Judah; Mount Paran lay in the desert region of Sinai. Both point south, the direction from which Hebrew poems traditionally pictured God advancing, as in the old accounts of Sinai. Selah appears often in the Psalms and is generally taken as a musical or performance direction (a pause, a louder passage, an instrumental break) but its exact sense is unknown.

3:4

The King James "horns coming out of his hand" uses the ordinary Hebrew word for an animal's horn, which was also used of anything projecting, including a shaft or ray of light. The image is of light streaming from his hand, not of literal horns.

3:5

Plague and fever are pictured as attendants walking before and behind a king in procession. The second word, resheph, was also the name of a Canaanite god of pestilence and fire; by this period it functioned in Hebrew as an ordinary word for burning fever or flame.

3:6

The Hebrew verb behind "measured" can also mean "shook," and ancient translators disagreed; the rendering keeps the traditional reading. Measuring the earth would picture a conqueror pacing out land he has taken possession of.

3:7

Cushan is otherwise unknown and is probably another name for Midian or a people living beside it. Midian was a nomadic desert region south and east of Judah, in the same direction as Teman and Paran. The "tent cloths" are the woven goat-hair panels that form a nomad's tent; naming them is a way of saying the whole encampment was shaking.

3:8

The questions expect the answer no. Older Near Eastern poetry often pictured a god fighting a battle against the sea and the rivers, and Hebrew poets reused that imagery; here it also recalls the sea and the Jordan being driven back in the exodus story. "Chariots of victory" translates a phrase that is literally "chariots of salvation", war chariots that bring rescue.

3:9

The middle of this verse is among the most obscure Hebrew in the Old Testament; word for word it runs roughly "oaths, tribes (or rods, or arrows), word." Some translators get "you called for many arrows," others "according to the oaths you swore to the tribes." The rendering holds both possibilities open. Taking a bow "out of its cover" means stripping off the case it traveled in, readying it to shoot.

3:10

"The deep" translates tehom, the mass of primeval water that Hebrew cosmology placed under and around the earth, the same word used of the waters at the beginning of Genesis. Its "lifting its hands on high" describes waves thrown upward.

3:11

Sun and moon halting recalls the account in Joshua 10 of the sun standing still over a battle. "In their place" translates a word for a dwelling or resting place, the station in the sky where the sun and moon were pictured as living.

3:12

Threshing meant driving oxen, or dragging a weighted wooden sledge, over cut grain spread on a hard flat floor, to break the kernels loose from the straw. Applied to armies and nations it is a standard image for trampling something to pieces.

3:13

"Anointed" translates mashiach, the word behind "messiah": a person installed in office by having olive oil poured over his head, normally the king, sometimes a priest. Here it means the reigning king, though some read it as the nation itself. The second half of the verse pictures a building torn down from its foundation upward, and the Hebrew is uncertain; "up to the neck" may be part of that demolition image or a shift back to the body of a man.

3:14

The Hebrew here is broken and every translation involves guesswork; the general picture is of an enemy's own weapons turned against him. Devouring the poor in secret is the image of a predator or bandit lying in ambush for someone who cannot fight back.

3:16

Rot entering the bones is a Hebrew idiom for being drained of all strength by fear, the bones standing for the body's inner frame. The second half of the verse is disputed: it can mean the prophet waits quietly for disaster to fall on the invaders, or that he waits for the day of trouble that will come on his own people.

3:17

These are the entire food supply of a Judean farm: figs, grapes, olives, field grain, sheep and cattle. Listing all of them failing at once is a standard way of describing a land stripped bare, whether by drought or by an army that has eaten and burned its way through.

3:19

"Hinds" in the King James are female deer; the point is their sure-footedness on steep rock. "High places" here means literal mountain heights, safe ground above an invader, and not the hilltop shrines that the same English phrase names elsewhere in the Old Testament. The final line is a performance instruction of the kind found at the head of many psalms, addressed to the leader of the temple musicians.