Habacuc 1:6

Levanto a los caldeos , es decir , traigo a los ejércitos caldeos o babilónicos a Judea. La frase implica que los caldeos aún no estaban en Judea, pero no hay ocasión de encontrar una alusión al reciente surgimiento de la nación caldea. Notamos este punto porque una teoría etnológica (ahora generalmente abandonada) ha considerado a los caldeos del período profético como elevados a la existencia nacional solo un poco antes de la fecha de Habacuc.

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. Habacuc 1:6 and Isaías 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 Habacuc 1:6, Kleinert well remarks, “The present passage is the locus classicus for the characteristics of this warlike people, just as Isaías 5:26 seq. is for the characteristics of the Assyrians.”