Charles Ellicott Commentary Habakkuk 1:6

"For, lo, I raise up the Chaldeans, that bitter and hasty nation, that march through the breadth of the earth, to possess dwelling-places that are not theirs." — Habakkuk 1:6 (ASV)

I raise up the Chaldeans—that is, I am bringing up the Chaldean or Babylonian armies into Judea. The phrase implies that the Chaldeans were not yet in Judea, but there is no need to find an allusion to the recent rise of the Chaldean nation. We notice this point because an ethnological theory (now generally abandoned) has regarded the Chaldeans of the prophetic period as having been raised to national existence only a short time before the date of Habakkuk.

It was supposed that they were a race distinct from the Chaldeans of earlier Scripture, being, in fact, an association of northern hordes who had only 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 lowly status as Assyrian colonists, to be the conquering people which they became under Nebuchadnezzar.” The refutation of this theory may be found in Rawlinson’s Ancient Monarchies, volume 1, pp. 57, 59.

It appears that Babylon was peopled at this time, not, as was formerly supposed, with hordes of Armenians, Arabs, Kurds, and Slavs, but with a mixed population, in which the old Chaldean and Assyrian elements preponderated. The Chaldeans 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 marvelous. But the work which is to make the Jews wonder is not God’s choice of an agent, but that agent’s actions; 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 striking because of their similarity in sound. With respect to the whole passage Habakkuk 1:6-11, Kleinert well remarks, “The present passage is the locus classicus for the characteristics of this warlike people, just as Isaiah 5:26 and following is for the characteristics of the Assyrians.”