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Habakkuk, Book ofInsight on the Scriptures, Volume 1
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At Habakkuk 1:6 this manuscript reads “Chaldeans,” thus confirming the correctness of the Masoretic text in showing that the Chaldeans (Babylonians) were the ones Jehovah would raise up as his agency.
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Habakkuk, Book ofInsight on the Scriptures, Volume 1
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Also, Jehovah’s declaration “I am raising up the Chaldeans” (1:6) and the prophecy’s general tenor show that the Chaldeans, or Babylonians, had not yet desolated Jerusalem. But Habakkuk 1:17 may suggest that they had already begun to overthrow some nations. During the reign of Judah’s good king Josiah (659-629 B.C.E.), the Chaldeans and Medes took Nineveh (in 632 B.C.E.), and Babylon was then on its way toward becoming a world power.—Na 3:7.
There are some who hold, in agreement with rabbinic tradition, that Habakkuk prophesied earlier, during the reign of King Manasseh of Judah. They believe that he was one of the prophets mentioned or alluded to at 2 Kings 21:10 and 2 Chronicles 33:10. They hold that the Babylonians were not yet a menace, which fact made Habakkuk’s prophecy more unbelievable to the Judeans.—See Hab 1:5, 6.
On the other hand, in the early part of Jehoiakim’s reign, Judah was within the Egyptian sphere of influence (2Ki 23:34, 35), and this could also be a time when God’s raising up of the Chaldeans to punish the wayward inhabitants of Judah would be to them ‘an activity they would not believe, though it was related.’ (Hab 1:5, 6) Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar defeated Pharaoh Necho at Carchemish in 625 B.C.E., in the fourth year of King Jehoiakim’s reign. (Jer 46:2) So, Habakkuk may have prophesied and recorded the prophecy before that event, possibly completing the writing thereof about 628 B.C.E. in Judah. The use of the future tense regarding the Chaldean threat evidently indicates a date earlier than Jehoiakim’s vassalship to Babylon (620-618 B.C.E.).—2Ki 24:1.
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