Introduction

A Question Put on Stage

Why do the wicked prosper while justice seems to sleep? It is a question every honest believer eventually asks, and Theophylact takes Habakkuk’s opening complaint as putting that very question on stage rather than as a lapse of faith on the prophet’s own part: he reads it as a deliberate rhetorical device—the prophet “brings on stage” the perplexity that troubled men actually felt, gives it full and honest voice, and only then supplies the answer the Spirit furnished him. Theophylact finds the same device at work in one of the Psalms, where David likewise voices, in the first person, the doubts of those scandalized by the peace enjoyed by sinners, before resolving them from within the sanctuary of God. Read this way, Habakkuk is not a record of one prophet’s private crisis of faith but a structured argument staged for the benefit of an entire people—Israel under the shadow of Babylon—who needed to hear their own unspoken questions asked aloud before they could hear them answered.

The dialogue that follows, spanning the book’s first two chapters, moves in a clear pattern that Theophylact tracks step by step: the prophet’s complaint that violence and injustice go unpunished; God’s first answer, that punishment is indeed coming, in the form of the Chaldeans, whose swift and terrible armies God himself is raising up; the prophet’s second, sharper objection, that this only trades one injustice for a worse one, since the instrument of judgment is more wicked than those it judges; and God’s second answer, delivered from a watchtower where the prophet stations himself to wait for it, that the proud will fall in their own time while “the just shall live by faith”. Theophylact treats this last saying, echoed later by Paul in his letters to the Romans and the Galatians, as the hinge of the whole book: the resolution to Habakkuk’s perplexity is not an explanation of why the wicked presently prosper but a summons to trust, patiently and without demanding the reasons in advance, in a Judge whose timing is not our own.

In the Midst of Two

The prophecy’s third and final chapter turns from dialogue to hymn, a prayer of astonished praise at what the prophet has been shown of God’s power and God’s coming deliverance, and Theophylact reads it as reaching, in places, well past its immediate occasion into a prophecy of Christ. The verse he treats with the most care, and the one for which this commentary is most often remembered, is the prophet’s declaration—in the Greek text before him—that God will be known “in the midst of two” (Hab. 3:2). The phrase is compressed almost to the point of obscurity, and Theophylact does what he does nowhere else in this book quite so openly: he sets out several readings rather than choosing one. It may mean, he says, the two ages, this present life and the life to come, between which the righteous Judge stands manifest. It may mean the two living creatures—the cherubim of glory that overshadowed the mercy seat in the Holy of Holies, between which the voice of God once spoke to the high priest—read now as a figure of Christ himself, who “became our mercy seat” by laying down his life, God still, though attended, as it were, by the cherubim on either side. And it may mean, more plainly, the Babylonians and the Jews, in the midst of whom God’s justice was made known through the very events the prophecy foretells. Theophylact commends the reading from the mercy seat without insisting that the others are wrong, and moves on rather than forcing the text to yield a single answer it may not have been written to give.

This reading has no footing in the Hebrew text of Habakkuk, which speaks not of “two” but of “years”, and asks that God’s work be made known “in the midst of the years”. The Septuagint translators before Theophylact evidently read the underlying Hebrew consonants differently, and it is their Greek text, not the Hebrew original, that Theophylact is expounding. He inherited this reading rather than inventing it, and it is worth noting that Habakkuk’s third chapter as a whole, hymn-like in its Greek form, has long stood among the small set of Old Testament songs that found a place in Eastern Christian worship in its own right. A reader coming from a Hebrew-based English Bible will not find this verse as Theophylact read it; that does not make his comment worthless, but it does mean the comment belongs to the Greek tradition’s own reception of the prophecy rather than to Habakkuk’s original wording, and is best read with that distinction in mind.

How to Read This Commentary

Habakkuk is short and tightly built, and Theophylact’s commentary follows its structure closely: a dialogue of complaint and answer in the first two chapters, then a hymn in the third that changes register entirely, moving from argument to praise. A reader will get the most from the dialogue by tracking each exchange as a distinct move—complaint, answer, sharper complaint, deeper answer—rather than reading straight through as a single continuous speech, since Theophylact’s comments are keyed closely to exactly where in that exchange each verse falls. The third chapter rewards a slower pace still, both because its poetry is denser than the prose dialogue that precedes it and because Theophylact is doing some of his most careful theological work there, weighing more than one legitimate reading rather than settling quickly on the first that presents itself—a discipline the reader does well to imitate when the prophet’s own words prove genuinely difficult to pin down.