Archived Daily Manna | Rejoice Fellowship | A mission to release people to rejoice in the world.

Message: Ihad meant to spend a day or at most two on Habakkuk, but this short book is so full of wonderful nuggets that I couldn't resist another passage. Habakkuk is known to most Christians, if at all, as a prophet who foretold the destruction of Jerusalem by the (Chaldean) Babylonians. (See chart.) His book is only three chapters, and it is infrequently read. Nobody knows who he was, where he came from or what happened to him. Iranians claim he is buried there and have a shrine at his burial site. His name is not Hebrew and, of all the Old Testament writers, he might be the hardest to translate. Many lines of translation in his three little chapters are outright guesses — some of the book is actually lost to humanity forever — and his imagery is so dense that it can take work to understand it fully, even when it is reliably translatable. But he was clearly a master poet as well as a prophet. Today’s selection is much clearer than most of the book and we can get the general ideas quite easily. Following it closely is a bit trickier, because it is “discontinuous” at times. Modern poets use the same discontinuity as Habakkuk; his was an innovative, original voice. We do see some more standard Hebrew parallelism — the bread-and-butter of Hebrew poetry — in verse two. But Habakkuk jumps around. Look at verse two. The second line (“To silent stone . . .”) restates only part of line one, the prepositional phrase beginning with “to”. Then it adds another detail: that the maker intends for the image to teach. golden statue Oscar He follows the theme of breath and speech from beginning to end. The maker tells the image to teach, but it has no breath. Breath here refers not only to its physical inability to make sound — and indeed, today, we could build a statue that talks (and in a sense we do, with “talking pictures,” i.e. movies and television). But breath, in the Bible, always brings to mind spirit and soul, not to mention physical life: “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.” (Genesis 2:7) So this statue cannot teach, first because it has no literal breath and cannot talk at all; but more importantly, because it does not have a spirit. All it has is a shiny gold surface in which the maker can see his own reflection. The only teaching the maker of it might have is the sound of his own voice, an idea Habakkuk reinforces with direct discourse: the maker of the statue saying “Awake!” and “Arise! It will teach!” The human speaks, the god is silent. So we now understand that the “teacher of lies” in the previous verse is actually the person making the statue. The statue tells neither truth nor lies. It is an inanimate object that reflects whoever made it. Habakkuk ends his poem with a magnificent and powerful couplet (which is frequently quoted). Before the true God, the man must stop talking and listen, for Yahweh will speak, teach, and create. The maker of graven images needs to keep silence; he needs to listen to the quiet voice of the one true God, and he also needs to be silent in the sense of ceasing to carve his statues. And so must we. We so often see people who cannot read the Bible in silence; they must speak. Readers, teachers, pastors and priests think they must give their opinion. But on a scale of 1 to 10, God’s words are an 11, and my opinion is a 0. Pride of opinion is a great stumbling block to understanding the Bible. We must listen in “silence” — particularly the nonsense spewed out by our own brains. We are sinners reading a Holy Book, the very Word of God left for us to learn the only real truth we will ever know. Two thousand years later, by the way, the form of the poem (two quatrains with a final couplet) came to be known as a “sonnetina tre”, and Shakespeare could have done no better with it.