Habakkuk 1:6

I raise up the Chaldeans — i.e., I am bringing up the Chaldæan or Babylonian armies into Judæa. The phrase implies that the Chaldæans were not yet in Judæa, but there is no occasion to find an allusion to the recent rise of the Chaldæan nation. We notice this point because an ethnological theory (now generally abandoned) has regarded the Chaldæans 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 Chaldæans 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 Chaldæan and Assyrian elements preponderated. The Chaldæans 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 nimhâr, is the more forcible, because of their similarity in sound. With respect to the whole passage Habakkuk 1:6, 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.”