Habakkuk 1

¹ The oracle that Habakkuk the prophet received in a vision.

² How long, Yahweh, am I to cry for help while you will not listen; to cry ‘Oppression!’ in your ear and you will not save?

³ Why do you set injustice before me, why do you look on where there is tyranny? Outrage and violence, this is all I see, all is contention, and discord flourishes.

⁴ And so the law loses its hold, and justice never shows itself. Yes, the wicked man gets the better of the upright, and so justice is seen to be distorted.

⁵ Cast your eyes over the nations, look, and be amazed, astounded. For I am doing something in your own days that you would not believe if you were told of it.

⁶ For now I am stirring up the Chaldaeans, that fierce and fiery people who march miles across country to seize the homes of others.

⁷ A people feared and dreaded, from their might proceeds their right, their greatness.

⁸ Their horses are swifter than leopards, fiercer than wolves in the dark; their horsemen gallop on, their horsemen advance from afar, swooping like an eagle to stoop on its prey.

⁹ They come for plunder, all of them, their faces scorching like an east wind; they scoop up prisoners like sand.

¹⁰ They are a people that scoff at kings, and laugh at princes. They make light of all fortresses: they heap up earth and take them.

¹¹ Then the wind changes and is gone… Sinful, he who makes his own strength his god.

¹² Are not you, from ancient times Yahweh, my God, my Holy One, who never dies? Yahweh, you have made this people an instrument of justice, set it firm as a rock in order to punish.

¹³ Your eyes are too pure to rest on wickedness, you cannot look on at tyranny. Why do you look on while men are treacherous, and stay silent while the evil man swallows a better man than he?

¹⁴ You treat mankind like fishes in the sea, like creeping, masterless things.

¹⁵ A people, these, who catch all on their hook, who draw them with their net, in their dragnet gather them, and so, triumphantly, rejoice.

¹⁶ At this, they offer a sacrifice to their net, and burn incense to their dragnet, for providing them with luxury and lavish food.

¹⁷ Are they then to empty their net unceasingly, slaughtering nations without pity?