Habakkuk 2:4

The translation I offer of Hab 2:4 goes like this: “It is swollen, not restrained / his appetite within him, // but the upright will live by faith.”

Here is the text again, in Hebrew and in translation:

הִנֵּה עֻפְּלָה לֹא־יָשְׁרָה   נַפְשׁוֹ בּוֹ
וְצַדִּיק בֶּאֱמוּנָתוֹ יִחְיֶה

It is swollen, not restrained,
      his appetite within him;
      but the upright will live by faith.

ישרה ‘straight, judicious,’ translated idiomatically with ‘restrained,’ and צדיק ‘upright, just’ cohere semantically. “His” appetite is swollen rather than judicious or within proper bounds. The judicious man, the upright individual, will live on the contrary on the basis of faith, a principle of delayed gratification. Translated literally, the first clause of 2:4 makes tolerable sense as a statement about the Chaldean juggernaut, the focus of discourse since 1:5.

My translation of the last line involves, for clarity’s sake, dropping the suffix on emunah “trust, faith, faithfulness” in the original: “the righteous will live by his emunah.”

A 1^st cent. ce exegete, Paul of Tarsus, did likewise (Rom 1:17; Gal 3:11). Not that his take on the text decides the sense of the original. On the other hand, it is not unusual for ancient authors to understand a traditional text in conformity with its plain sense.

However one interprets the particulars of 2:4b, the gist, as we shall see, remains the same: the upright person, in the face of injustice and calamity, will live out his life on the basis of trust in the trustworthiness of the vision vouchsafed to the prophet, namely, that an end to the calamitous situation will come, and not delay.

The grammar and referentiality of 2:4b can be understood in any of the following ways:

(1)    The upright one will live (in the midst of the current crisis) on the basis of his ‘trustingness,’ his faith-in / faithfulness-to (the vision and the counsel of the giver of the vision)

(2)    The upright one will live (in the midst of the current crisis) on the basis of its (the vision’s) truthfulness.

(3)    The upright one will live (in the midst of the current crisis) on the basis of *my* (God’s) faithfulness (so LXX originally, per S, B, Q, V, and W^a).

(4)    The upright one will live (in the midst of the current crisis) on the basis of ‘faith in it’ (the vision)

Option #4 reads the suffix of emunah as an objective genitive. The possibility is suggested by a Qumran text if understood along the following lines: “‘And my goodness I will give to you; you, is not my bounty for you?’ And in trust of me he walked continually.” (4Q418 81+81a, 6). “In trust in me” is an idiomatic translation of be-emunati ‘in my trust.’ Others read be-emunato ‘in his trust’ and translate “in faithfulness to Him” (Garcia Martinez and Tigchelaar). In either case, an objective genitive.

Option #3 depends on reading the suffix of emunah in Hebrew as ‘my’ rather than ‘his.’ A very small difference. The letters in question, waw and yodh, were easily confused by copyists.

Option #2, like #4, requires the antecedent to the pronominal suffix to lie outside of the clause in which it occurs, to wit, in the preceding poetic verse (the vision).

Option #1 commends itself more than the others. It requires no change to the traditional text attested as early as 8 HevXIIgr 17:29-30 [1^st cent. bce] (against #3). In the absence of contrary indications, it is natural to take the suffix attached to emunah as referring back to the immediately preceding “upright one” (against #2 and #4).

It is also possible to understand the text as follows:

(5) The upright one will live (in the midst of the current crisis) on the basis of his dutifulness.

Dutifulness to what, however, is not clear from the context, unless it be to the vision. If not to the vision, to the giver of the vision. But dutifulness to the giver of the vision would entail duty to the command he gives in context: “If it tarries, wait for it!” Voilà! In either case, we are back to Paul’s interpretation of the passage, and to option #1: “the upright will live by faith.”

In short, the overall semantics of the text are such that all roads, as it were, lead to Rome. More precisely, Romans and Galatians.

How so? Trust implicates the trustworthiness of its object which implicates the faithfulness and faith-worthiness of the object’s giver. Faithfulness to a promise or command implicates the worthiness of the giver thereof to elicit faithfulness.

Bibliography

Francis I. Andersen, Habakkuk. A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (AB 25; New York: Doubleday, 2001) 208-216

This post is part of a series:

• The Book of Habakkuk: An Introduction
• The Prophet as Intercessor
• Faith-based Religion
• Assurance of Things Hoped For
• Habakkuk 2:4
• Anticipated Closure
• Good and Bad Imperialism
• The Anticipatory Reach of Prophecy

Comments

[Lingamish]

Thanks for writing about my favorite prophet. Your rendering strikes me as so bold in the beginning and so bland in the end. Habakkuk is classic OT prosperity preaching.

[JohnFH]

It is bland at the end. I'll have to work on that. Good to hear from you, David.

[Lingamish]

I've always assumed Paul was tweaking the traditional understanding of "the righteous man will live because of his own fidelity." There ought to be a way to suggest that in translation so that the untutored reader doesn't assume that this is about living "by faith" an interpretation which I deny.

[JohnFH]

I'm not sure one can resolve the ambiguity that "faith" has in English by means of paraphrase without goofing up the passage in other ways. The context, I believe, makes the sense clear in any case.

In Latin an important distinction is expressed thusly:

(1) fides qua creditur "the faith = trust by which one believes = subjective faith
(2) fides quae creditur "the faith = content that one believes = objective faith

There is no doubt that Hab 2 underlines the life-saving nature of fides qua. The object of the faith is not a set of rules, nor a set of propositions, but a vision and ultimately, the author of that vision.

It's hard to translate this. I know what kind of person this verse is talking about. I would never call them "upright." What an unforgivably stodgy word. The people this verse is talking are the go-getters, the prisoners of hope. How to capture that and capture the fact that a tsaddiq is a "dire straight' if you get the drift.

[WoundedEgo]

Since "Paul's Bible" was a greek text, the Hebrew is irrelevant and even misleading. He quotes his LXX verbatim, making his arguments from what *it* says.

[JohnFH]

Hi Wounded Ego,

You certainly are onto something. Yes, Paul read his Bible in Greek, but the first translations of the various books of the Bible continued to be revised before, during, and beyond Paul's day in order to bring the translations into greater conformity with details of the particular Hebrew text that eventually become the Masoretic Text.

It has to be understood that for Paul and everyone else in his day, whether they read the books of the Bible in Hebrew or Greek, allowance had to be made for the fact that the biblical text was multiform and might differ in details. Without excluding alternatives, an exegete might choose to quote the version that best made a point of interest.

Furthermore, loose or modified quotation was an accepted practice. Not just Paul, but the Sages do this.

I'm not sure we know what Paul's text of Hab 2:4 looked like, the one he looked up in the manuscript(s) available to him.

I am convinced that if someone said to him, "my text reads like this, take a look," he would have, and would have hoped to make the same point from that text that he had made based on the one he had quoted.

So I don't think Paul would have thought of the Hebrew as irrelevant. On the contrary.