1. The oracle that Habakkuk the prophet saw.
2. O Yahweh, how long shall I cry for help and you will not listen? How long will I cry out to you, “Violence!” and you will not save?
3. Why do you cause me to see evil while you look at trouble? Destruction and violence happen before me; contention and strife arise.
4. Therefore the law is paralyzed, and justice does not go forth perpetually. For the wicked surround the righteous; therefore justice goes forth perverted.
5. “Look among the nations and see; be astonished and astounded. For a work is about to be done in your days that you will not believe if it is told.
6. For look! I am raising up the Chaldeans, the bitter and impetuous nation, the one who walks through the spacious places of earth to take possession of dwellings not belonging to it.
7. They are dreadful and awesome; their justice and their dignity proceed from themselves.
8. Their horses are more swift than leopards; they are more menacing than wolves at dusk. Their horsemen gallop; their horsemen come from afar; they fly like an eagle that is swift to devour.
9. All of them come for violence, their faces pressing forward. They gather captives like the sand.
10. And they themselves scoff at kings and rulers are a joke to them. They laugh at every fortification, and they heap up earth and take it.
11. Then they sweep like the wind and pass on; they become guilty, whose might is their god!”
12. Are you not from of old, O Yahweh my God, my Holy One? You shall not die. O Yahweh, you have marked them for judgment; O Rock, you have established them for reproof.
13. Your eyes are too pure to see evil, and you are not able to look at wrongdoing. Why do you look at the treacherous? Why are you silent when the wicked swallows up someone more righteous than him?
14. You make humankind like fish of the sea, like crawling creatures that have no ruler among them.
15. He brings up all of them with a fishhook; he drags them up with a fishnet; he gathers them in his dragnet. Therefore, he rejoices and exults.
16. Therefore he sacrifices to his fishnet and makes offerings to his dragnet, for by them he makes a good living and his food is rich.
17. Will he therefore empty his fishnet and continually kill nations without showing mercy?