CHAPTER XII
“IN THE MIDST OF THE YEARS”
HABAKKUK iii.
We have seen the impossibility of deciding the age of the ode which is attributed to Habakkuk in the third chapter of his book.[417] But this is only one of the many problems raised by that brilliant poem. Much of its text is corrupt, and the meaning of many single words is uncertain. As in most Hebrew poems of description, the tenses of the verbs puzzle us; we cannot always determine whether the poet is singing of that which is past or present or future, and this difficulty is increased by his subject, a revelation of God in nature for the deliverance of Israel. Is this the deliverance from Egypt, with the terrible tempests which accompanied it? Or have the features of the Exodus been borrowed to describe some other deliverance, or to sum up the constant manifestation of Jehovah for His people’s help?
The introduction, in ver. 2, is clear. The singer has heard what is to be heard of Jehovah, and His great deeds in the past. He prays for a revival of these in the midst of the years. The times are full of trouble and turmoil. Would that God, in the present confusion of baffled hopes and broken issues, made Himself manifest by power and brilliance, as of old! In turmoil remember mercy! To render turmoil by wrath, as if it were God’s anger against which the singer’s heart appealed, is not true to the original word itself,[418] affords no parallel to the midst of the years, and misses the situation. Israel cries from a state of life in which the obscure years are huddled together and full of turmoil. We need not wish to fix the date more precisely than the writer himself does, but may leave it with him in the midst of the years.
There follows the description of the Great Theophany, of which, in his own poor times, the singer has heard. It is probable that he has in his memory the events of the Exodus and Sinai. On this point his few geographical allusions agree with his descriptions of nature. He draws all the latter from the desert, or Arabian, side of Israel’s history. He introduces none of the sea-monsters, or imputations of arrogance and rebellion to the sea itself, which the influence of Babylonian mythology so thickly scattered through the later sea-poetry of the Hebrews. The Theophany takes place in a violent tempest of thunder and rain, the only process of nature upon which the desert poets of Arabia dwell with any detail. In harmony with this, God appears from the southern desert, from Teman and Paran, as in the theophanies in Deuteronomy xxxiii. and in the Song of Deborah;[419] a few lines recall the Song of the Exodus,[420] and there are many resemblances to the phraseology of the Sixty-Eighth Psalm. The poet sees under trouble the tents of Kushan and of Midian, tribes of Sinai. And though the Theophany is with floods of rain and lightning, and foaming of great waters, it is not with hills, rivers or sea that God is angry, but with the nations, the oppressors of His poor people, and in order that He may deliver the latter. All this, taken with the fact that no mention is made of Egypt, proves that, while the singer draws chiefly upon the marvellous events of the Exodus and Sinai for his description, he celebrates not them alone but all the ancient triumphs of God over the heathen oppressors of Israel. Compare the obscure line—these be His goings of old.
The report of it all fills the poet with trembling (ver. 16 returns upon ver. 26), and although his language is too obscure to permit us to follow with certainty the course of his feeling, he appears to await in confidence the issue of Israel’s present troubles. His argument seems to be, that such a God may be trusted still, in face of approaching invasion (ver. 16).
The next verse, however, does not express the experience of trouble from human foes; but figuring the extreme affliction of drought, barrenness and poverty, the poet speaking in the name of Israel declares that, in spite of them, he will still rejoice in the God of their salvation (ver. 17). So sudden is this change from human foes to natural plagues, that some scholars have here felt a passage to another poem describing a different situation. But the last lines with their confidence in the God of salvation, a term always used of deliverance from enemies, and the boast, borrowed from the Eighteenth Psalm, He maketh my feet like to hinds’ feet, and gives me to march on my heights, reflect the same circumstances as the bulk of the Psalm, and offer no grounds to doubt the unity of the whole.[421]
PSALM[422] OF HABAKKUK THE PROPHET.
LORD, I have heard the report of Thee;