Habakkuk wrote after the fall of Ninevah to the Babylonians. The author is Habakkuk except for the third chapter, which appears to be a psalm added at a later date.

1. Habakkuk asks God why He doesn’t listen, why He doesn't save (His people), why He tolerates injustice, and why justice ‘never prevails’. Habakkuk then answers his questions, as God, saying ‘I am going to do something that you would not believe, even if I told you. I am raising up (empowering) the Babylonians.’ Habakkuk’s questions are excellent, but ‘God’s answer’ is not an answer by any stretch of the imagination. Habakkuk returns to his questions, asking God why He tolerates the treacherous, and why He is silent when the wicked prosper.

2. God tells Habakkuk to be patient, that justice will be done, and to live by his faith. Following this there is a lot of poetic descriptions of sin, but nothing that answers, or even attempts to answer, the questions.

3. A prayer to God, praising His power, how He shakes the earth and makes nations tremble, how He rides with horses and ‘victorious chariots’, and how He crushes the wicked. The author says that he waits for the ‘day of calamity to come to the nation that invades us.’

Both Habakkuk and Job (earlier in the Old Testament) ask questions of God but neither receive a meaningful response. And there’s a good reason for this. The conversations that occur in our own mind, irrespective of who we attribute them to, only know what we know, by some personal faculty, at some personal level. God can’t answer questions we either don’t know already, or can’t figure out by our self.

Back to Nahum. Forward to Zephaniah.