(2) Literary Style. His representations are not inferior to those of the most flourishing age of prophecy, in independent strength, in perfect beauty of arrangement of the parts, and in skill fully rounded discourse, and they combine the' greatest force and fullness with the loftiest flights of thought. The style is distinguished by care fully selected and unusual words and turns of expression, which are in some measure quite peculiar to himself. (Keil, Introd. to O. T., vol. Ik P. 412.) Dehtzsch Cont. on Hab., p. xiii: "Nowhere else do we find the form of alternate discourse (between God and the pronhct) carried out so far, or prophecy so intimately connected with /yric poetry (to the extent which we see in the structure of the strophes in chapter ii, and the musical arrangement in chapter iii). Like Isaiah, he is comparatively far less dependent than other prophets on his predecessors, in respcct of both form and matter. Everything still mirrors the most flourishing age of the prophetic order—that age in which prophetic poetry took the place of the holy lyric poetry that had hitherto been the mode of utterance for the religious life of the church, and having been laid hold of mightily by God, came with her trumpet voice to awaken anew the consciousness of God in the church now spiritually dead." (3) Teaching. The central and distinctive teaching of the book lies in the declaration of Hab. :4, and, as indicated above, the truc sense of this is, that while the wild excesses of the tyrant carry in them the germ of certain ruin.
the 'faithfulness' of the righteous (not his faith) will be to him a principle of life. It is evi dent that this declaration is no sohaion of the moral anomaly which the prophet discerns. The Chalthean might indeed, in virtue of his very na ture, be doomed ultimately to perish. but his em pire survived for seventy years; and meanwhile Ilabakkuk's compatriots, so far from abiding in peace and security, experienced the indescribable hardships of siege and exile. But 'live' is here used in the full and pregnant sense which it sometimes has in the Old Testament (e. g. Ezek. xviii), of living in the light and consciousness of the Divine favor, and what Habakkuk thus prom ises is not mere material prosperity, but the moral security--of course. often not unaccompanied by material bencfits—which righteousness brings with it even in the midst of external calamities (cf. Is. xxxiii :14-16), and the sense of Divine ap proval which even then does not desert it. It is enough for the prophet if he can initigate the difficulty which pressed upon him, as it pressed no doubt upon many of his contemporaries, by re calling to them these two truths of God's provi dence, the doom which, at least ultimately, over takes the tyrant, and thc moral security cnj-oyed by the righteous. (S. R. Driver, Hastings Bib. Dia.) 3. Literature. A. B. Davidson, in the Cam& Bible for School s; F. W. Farrar, in the Minor Profihets ('Nlen of the Bible); A. F. Kirkpatrick, Doctrine of the Prophets; Keil, Introd. to O. T.
or BARICANIM ka-nim or bar'ka-nim). Sce THORNS.