by
Damien F. Mackey
“Easter begins by upsetting our expectations”, according to pope Francis.
Our God is a God of surprises. He upsets our ancestral traditions, good as some of those may appear to be. ‘You have heard it said …. But I tell you’.
Pray for your enemies; don’t lust after any person; restrain your anger.
The Hebrews thought that they had God pretty well worked out (as do today’s Fundamentalist Christians; ISIS; theoretical physicists). He was basically like they were. All you need to say is ‘’God [Allah] wills it”, and He just falls into line. He made us in his own image and likeness. Why not now re-make him in ours?
Scientists can turn God into a complex (though completely meaningless) mathematical equation, then declare that they have Him fully defined.
Job’s three friends, likewise, had God all (mathematically) cut and dried:
The Lord rewards the good and punishes the wicked – even in this life.
That idea was still circulating at the time of the Apostles (cf. John 9:1-3), who themselves apparently had not learned the lesson of their ancient Book of Job.
No, that old saying is clearly not true, exclaimed the righteous Job, who had grown up with this kind of thinking, but who now had serious cause to reject it. He was righteous - {had not God even declared him to be such?} - yet here was God attacking Job as if he were His own mortal enemy.
Well, you must have strayed from your formerly righteous ways, declared the three friends, Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar. So now God is justly punishing you. Repent and return to what you were like before, and all will be well with you again, and with your family.
It was left to the wise young Elihu (was he the contemporary prophet Ezekiel?) to correct these three older ‘sages’, and to serve as something of a bridge between Job and God.
…..
But why focus so much upon the prophet Job in an article presumably about Habakkuk?
Well, you see, Habakkuk was Job!
Habakkuk (a name only a mother could love) was grappling with the same sort of problem that had so occupied the mind of Job (also of Jeremiah). Basically, it was ‘the problem of evil’, which a quick glance at the Internet tells is this:
The problem of evil is the question of how to reconcile the existence of evil
and suffering with an omnipotent, omnibenevolent, and omniscient God.
Specifically, Job-Habakkuk was wondering why God, who the prophet dearly wanted to be God, and to act like God (Habakkuk 3:2):
I have heard of your fame; I stand in awe of your deeds, Lord.
Repeat them in our day, in our time make them known [,]
had seemingly ceased to act like a just God (Habakkuk 1:2-4):
‘How long, LORD, must I call for help,
but you do not listen?
Or cry out to you, “Violence!”
but you do not save?
Why do you make me look at injustice?
Why do you tolerate wrongdoing?
Destruction and violence are before me;
there is strife, and conflict abounds.
Therefore the law is paralyzed,
and justice never prevails.
The wicked hem in the righteous,
so that justice is perverted’.
We know what you are capable of, Lord. Have not our ancestors passed on to us the accounts of your mighty deeds, such as at the time of the Plagues of Egypt and the Exodus. Here we are today oppressed by, not the Egyptians any more, but by those horrible Chaldeans. ‘Do those mighty things again in our day, in our time make them known’.
Had not the Chaldeans, with their basest of kings, Nebuchednezzar (Prayer of Azariah 1:9): ‘And thou didst deliver us into the hands of lawless enemies, most hateful forsakers of God, and to an unjust king, and the most wicked in all the world’,
who were making life miserable for Habakkuk and his compatriots, been the same people who had despoiled the hapless Job at the beginning of his troubles? (Job 1:17):
While he was still speaking, another messenger came and said,
‘The Chaldeans formed three raiding parties and swept down on your camels
and made off with them. They put the servants to the sword, and I am the only one who has escaped to tell you!’
This is clear evidence that the elderly Job (young Tobias of the Book of Tobit) had belonged to the same era of Habakkuk, the era of the Chaldeans, and not – as many think and argue – to the Ice Ages, or to the time of the ancient Hebrew patriarchs, or, perhaps, to the Judges.
That name, Habakkuk (close your eyes now and try to spell it).
Habakkuk (חֲבַקּוּק) is not actually a Jewish (Hebrew) name.
It is Akkadian, khabbaququ, the name of a garden herb. We would expect Tobias (Job) to have had an Akkadian name in Nineveh, just as Daniel and his three companions were given Babylonian names (Shadrach looks Elamite, Shutruk).
Strangely, Habakkuk, had never been to Babylon.
Thus he tells the angel, who is about to take him by the hair - the first ever [h]air flight to southern Iraq: ‘Sir, I have never seen Babylon …’.
Daniel 14:33-36:
Now the prophet Habakkuk was in Judea; he had made a stew and had broken bread into a bowl, and was going into the field to take it to the reapers. But the angel of the Lord said to Habakkuk, ‘Take the food that you have to Babylon, to Daniel, in the lions’ den’. Habakkuk said, ‘Sir, I have never seen Babylon, and I know nothing about the den’. Then the angel of the Lord took him by the crown of his head and carried him by his hair; with the speed of the wind he set him down in Babylon, right over the den.
As a young man, Tobias, living in Nineveh, had needed an angelic guide, archangel Raphael, to show him the way to “Media” and “Ecbatana” (Bashan), beyond Charan (Haran) (Tobit 11:1, Douay). No doubt the same angel who lifted into the air an older Tobias-Job (= Habakkuk) and carried him to Babylon.
Again, presumably the same being as Job’s mysterious Advocate in heaven (Job 16:19).
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