Habakkuk 3 in plain modern English. New Ground English Translation.
Time Period
~605 BC, shortly before or just after Babylon's first strike against Jerusalem
Location
The kingdom of Judah, centred on Jerusalem, with the poem recalling God's ancient marches from Sinai, Teman and Mount Paran in the southern desert
Audience
The people of Judah facing invasion, and specifically the temple singers who would perform this piece
Situation
Having argued with God about why he would use the brutal Babylonians to punish Judah, the prophet closes with a sung prayer picturing God striding out in storm and earthquake to rescue his people. He ends by saying that even if the crops fail and the flocks die, he will still rejoice.
Key Background
The chapter is laid out as a piece of temple music, with a heading naming its tune style, the term Selah marking pauses within it, and a closing note assigning it to the director of music with stringed instruments. Its imagery of God coming from the southern mountains in thunder and flood deliberately recalls the exodus and the crossing of the sea, reminding a frightened generation of a rescue that had already happened. The closing list of failures, no figs, no grapes, no olives, no grain, no sheep, no cattle, is a precise picture of what an invading army left behind, since sieges stripped orchards and drove off herds.
A prayer of Habakkuk the prophet. On
Yahweh, I have heard the report of you, and I am afraid. Yahweh, do your work again in the middle of our own years. In the middle of our years let it be known. In all that rage, remember
God comes up from Teman, the no other from Mount Selah. His brightness covers the sky, and the earth is full of his praise.
The light of him is like sunrise. Rays go out from his hand, and that is where his power is hidden.
Plague walks ahead of him, and comes out at his feet.
He stopped, and took the measure of the earth. He looked, and the nations jumped. The ancient mountains cracked apart. The oldest hills went down flat. The roads he walks have always been his.
I saw the tents of in trouble, the tent cloth of Midian shaking.
Was it the rivers you were angry at, Yahweh? Was the rivers what your anger was for, or the that you came at it in fury, riding your horses, your chariots that carry rescue?
You stripped your bow bare, your arrows sworn and ready. Selah. You split the ground open with rivers.
The mountains saw you and twisted. A wall of swept past. The gave its voice and lifted its hands as high as they would go.
Sun and moon stood still in their high house at the light of your arrows going over, at the flash of your shining spear.
You marched across the earth in anger. You the nations under your feet.
You came out to rescue your people, to rescue the you on. You knocked the head off the house of the corrupt and stripped it bare from the foundation to the roof. Selah.
You drove his own arrows through the head of his fighters when they came on like a storm to scatter us, laughing already, as if they were about to eat a poor man alive in his hiding place.
You rode your horses over the sea, churning the great water into foam.
I heard it, and my over. My lips shook at the sound. Rot came into my bones and my legs went out from under me. So I will wait for the day of trouble to come up on the people who are raiding us.
Even if the puts out no buds and there is hanging on the vines, if the olive crop to nothing and the fields bring up no food, if the sheep are gone from the pen and there is not one cow left in the stalls,
even then I will be glad because of Yahweh. I will with in the who me.
Yahweh my Lord is my strength. He gives me the of a deer and sets me walking on the heights. For the On my