God has just answered Habakkuk's second complaint with a promise, that the righteous will live by faith while the proud consume themselves. This passage turns the promise into an indictment, five woes against the nation Habakkuk most feared, the Chaldeans. The nations Babylon has plundered will one day sing this taunt back at her, turning her conquest into material for her humiliation.
The word "woe" opens each of the five sections. The Hebrew hoy began as a funeral cry. The first woe targets plunder. 6"Woe to him who heaps up what is not his own." What Babylon extracted from conquered nations will be reclaimed the same way, suddenly and by force. The second targets the illusion of safety that wealth buys, a nest set on high to be beyond the reach of harm. Habakkuk's image lands with force. 11"The stone will cry out from the wall, and the beam from the woodwork respond." The building materials of an unjust empire will testify against the hands that raised them.
The third woe is the sharpest. 12"Woe to him who builds a town with blood and founds a city on iniquity!" Empire-building itself is named as the crime, the whole foundation. And in the middle of this darkest indictment comes the passage's one line of pure hope: 14"the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD as the waters cover the sea." Habakkuk weaves two older promises into one, God's word after the wilderness rebellion that the earth would be filled with his glory (Numbers 14:21) and Isaiah's picture of the earth full of the knowledge of the LORD (Isaiah 11:9). Glory and knowledge are bound together, as if neither were complete without the other. Babylon's bloody ambition will not have the last word over the earth. Something larger is coming, something that fills every corner as an ocean fills its basin, whatever any single empire builds or destroys on the way.
The fourth woe names a particular cruelty, making neighbors drunk to expose their shame, and it promises a reversal. 16"The cup in the LORD's right hand will come around to you." The cup Babylon forced on others will come to her from God's own hand. The fifth woe turns to the emptiness under all of it, idols, wood and stone, and the priests who make them. 19"There is no breath at all in it." Babylonian priests had a ritual for this called the opening of the mouth, in which a carved and gilded image was washed, fed, carried through the streets, and finally had its eyes opened with a wand before being enthroned as a god. An empire that brings its gods to life by ceremony has rested its confidence on something it had to animate by hand.
The song ends by turning from all that noise to something utterly different. 20"But the LORD is in his holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before him." After every accusation has been spoken, the fitting response is silence, the kind owed to a God whose glory will fill the earth long after every idol-making empire has finished building and collapsing.
Ask what you have built, however small, on someone else's loss. Then be quiet before the LORD, and let the promise of a glory-filled earth be bigger in you than any empire.
Prayer
Father, thank you for a promise no bloody ambition can outlast, that the earth will be filled with the knowledge of your glory as the waters cover the sea. Where we have built anything on cutting others off for our gain, expose it as these woes exposed Babylon. When every accusation has been spoken, teach us the silence this passage ends in, waiting before you in your holy temple. In Jesus' name, amen.