Charles Ellicott Commentary Habakkuk 1:5

"Behold ye among the nations, and look, and wonder marvellously; for I am working a work in your days, which ye will not believe though it be told you." — Habakkuk 1:5 (ASV)

Among the heathen.—These words are emphatic. They imply—Jehovah will no longer manifest Himself among His chosen people, but among the Gentiles. Let them look abroad, and they will see Him using the Chaldeans as His instrument for their own chastisement. They are to “wonder,” not at God’s choice of an agent, but at the consequences of the visitation, which resulted in the sack of the Temple, and the deportation of 10,000 captives—a work which the Jews might well not have believed, even if it were told to them.

The words “among the heathen” (bag-gôyim) were probably misread by the Septuagint translators as bôg ’ dîm. Hence the translation, Καταφρονηταί, “you despisers.”

In Acts 13:41, St. Paul is represented as citing the verse in its Septuagint form, as a warning to his Jewish hearers at Antioch. This citation, of course, gives no authority whatever to the variant. Nor is it certain that St. Paul did not actually quote the Hebrew form of the verse, which would seem more appropriate to the circumstances than the other. (Acts 13:46 and following.) That St. Luke should substitute the Greek variant is intelligible enough.