Habakkuk Chapter 1 verse 6 Holy Bible

Pulpit Commentary

Pulpit CommentaryVerse 6. - The executors of the Divine vengeance are now plainly announced. I raise up. God does it; he uses the power and passion of men to work out his designs (1 Kings 11:14, 23; Amos 6:14). The Chaldeans; Kasidim. By this appellation the prophets signify the soldiers or inhabitants of Babylon, which won its independence and commenced its wonderfully rapid career of conquest after the tall of Nineveh, between B.C. 626 and 608. At the time when Habakkuk wrote the Chaldeans had not appeared in Judaea, and no apprehension of danger from them was entertained. Bitter and hasty. The former epithet refers to their cruelty and ferocity (comp. Isaiah 14:6; Jeremiah 6:23; Jeremiah 50:42). They are called "hasty," as being vehement and impetuous in attack and rapid in movement. Which shall march through the breadth of the land; which marcheth through the breadths of the earth. The statement explains the general character of the Chaldeans, and points to the foreign conquests of Nebuchadnezzar. LXX., Τὸ πορευόμενον ἐπὶ τὰ πλάτη τῆς γῆς (comp. Revelation 20:9).

Ellicott's Commentary

Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers(6) I raise up the Chaldeans--i.e., I am bringing up the Chaldaean or Babylonian armies into Judaea. The phrase implies that the Chaldaeans were not yet in Judaea, but there is no occasion to find an allusion to the recent rise of the Chaldaean nation. We notice this point because an ethnological theory (now generally abandoned) has regarded the Chaldaeans of the prophetic period as raised to national existence only a little time before the date of Habakkuk. It was supposed that they were a race distinct from the Chaldaeans of earlier Scripture; being, in fact, an association of northern hordes who had but recently penetrated the lower Mesopotamian valley. Habakkuk 1:6 and Isaiah 23:13 were therefore interpreted as illustrating the fact that these new nationalities "were on a sudden 'raised up,' elevated from their low estate of Assyrian colonists, to be the conquering people which they became under Nebuchadnezzar." The confutation of this theory may be found in Rawlinson's Ancient Monarchies, i. 57, 59. It appears that Babylon was peopled at this time, not, as was formerly supposed, with hordes of Armenians, Arabs, Kurds, and Sclaves, but with a mixed population, in which the old Chaldaean and Assyrian elements preponderated. The Chaldaeans of the seventh century B.C. were, in fact, as legitimate descendants of the people of Nimrod's empire as we are of the Saxons. Certainly, the rapidity with which Babylon rose from the position of an Assyrian colony to that of ruler of Asia was marvellous. But the work which is to make the Jews wonder is not God's choice of an agent, but that agent's proceeding; not the elevation of one Gentile power in the place of another, but the attack which that new power is to make upon the sacred city.Bitter and hasty.--Better, fierce and impetuous. The association of these two epithets, mar and nimhar, is the more forcible, because of their similarity in sound. With respect to the whole passage Habakkuk 1:6-11, Kleinert well remarks, "The present passage is the locus classicus for the characteristics of this warlike people, just as Isaiah 5:26 seq. is for the characteristics of the Assyrians."