A prophet who argues with God about why the wicked prosper, and is answered by being told something worse is coming. It is also the prophetic book with the best manuscript witness from antiquity, and that commentary tells us as much about its readers as about its author.
What the book is
Habakkuk is built as a dialogue. The prophet complains that violence goes unpunished; God answers that the Chaldeans are being raised up; the prophet complains that this is worse, since the instrument is more wicked than those it punishes; God answers again. Chapter 3 is a separate psalm, with musical notation, describing a theophany.
It is the only prophetic book in which the prophet’s objection to the answer is preserved as part of the text rather than resolved away.
How it is put together
Chapters 1 and 2 carry the dialogue and the series of woes that follows it. Chapter 3 has its own superscription, a musical instruction, and the term selah, and reads as an independent liturgical poem. Its relationship to the rest is debated; notably, the Qumran commentary covers chapters 1 and 2 only.
The line that a righteous person will live by faithfulness, in chapter 2, is the single most quoted verse of the book, and its later use in the New Testament and in the Reformation gave it an afterlife far beyond its context.
The dating question
The Chaldeans — the Neo-Babylonians — are named as a power being raised up and described as new and terrifying. That points to the period when Babylon had become the threat but had not yet done its worst to Judah: after the fall of Nineveh in 612 BCE and the battle of Carchemish in 605, and before the destruction of Jerusalem in 587.
That is a narrow and unusually well-supported window for a prophetic book, and it is one of the few cases where the internal reference is to a named power at a datable moment rather than to a generic enemy. The main dissent argues that the reference to the Chaldeans is a later insertion into an older complaint.
Where the external record touches it
The rise of Babylon is documented independently and in detail by the Babylonian chronicles, the same body of administrative record that dates the fall of Nineveh. The chronicles give the campaigns of Nabopolassar and Nebuchadnezzar year by year, including Carchemish and the first capture of Jerusalem.
The manuscript evidence is exceptional. The Habakkuk pesher from Qumran, one of the first scrolls found, preserves chapters 1 and 2 with a verse-by-verse commentary applying the text to the commentators’ own community and its enemies. It dates to the first century BCE.
That commentary is directly relevant to this site’s subject. It is a documented, datable example of an ancient community reading a prophetic text as though it referred to their own present — not as history, not as prediction of a distant future, but as being about them, now. Anyone assessing how prophetic texts get applied should read it, because the mechanism is visible in it.
Related: the overviews of Nahum and Jeremiah, and the method note on prophecy written after the event.