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.
CHAPTER XI
TYRANNY IS SUICIDE
HABAKKUK ii. 5–20
In the style of his master Isaiah, Habakkuk follows up his Vision with a series of lyrics on the same subject: chap. ii. 5–20. They are taunt-songs, the most of them beginning with Woe unto, addressed to the heathen oppressor. Perhaps they were all at first of equal length, and it has been suggested that the striking refrain in which two of them close—