INTRODUCTION. AUTHORSHIP AND DATE. History and tradition give us no reliable facts as to the personality or age of Habakkuk, so that we are left entirely to internal evidence for our conclusions. Peiser, MVAG., viii, p. 5 sq., connects his name with Assyrian hambakuku, name of a garden plant, and finds in his use of words in 22 evidence that he was trained at Nineveh in Assyrian learning, perhaps a captive prince; but this is pure imagination. We only know that the book, substantially as we have it, was composed or compiled early enough to form a part of the second collection of sacred writings, called The Prophets, and that it antedated the editing of the Hagiographa. The third chapter is indicated by its title and its colophon, as well as by its character and by a passage duplicated in Ps. 77, to be a psalm, perhaps taken from a psalm-book, and does not appear to be genetically connected with the first two chapters, although assigned by the editor to the same author. The use of in 33 and of for Israel in 313, and the almost total loss of the article, are mentioned by Budde as proofs of a late origin. The chief difficulty in the study of Habakkuk is found in the question, Who are the "wrong-doers," the 12 against whom the prophecy is directed? It is distinctly stated in 15-11 that the Chaldeans will be summoned as Yahweh's ministers of correction. This puts the date of this passage at a time shortly before the capture of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar, and in the reign of Jehoiakim. No other date can be given to these verses, unless 12-11 be regarded as a dramatic representation of an earlier divine interposition for punishment. But just as plainly 112-220 was written after the capture of Jerusalem, while the Jews were under the yoke of a foreign oppressor. In the 1 were to be punished by the |