Yahweh Gears Up for Battle: Habakkuk 3,9a The MT of Hab 3,9a reads: rm,ao t/Fm' t/[buv] // ÚT,v]q' r/[te hy:r“[, (1). F. Delitzsch once opined that the second colon of this verse may be the most difficult passage in Habakkuk if not in the entire prophetic corpus (2). More recently D. Pardee characterized it as “one of the most difficult verses of the Hebrew Bible” (3). Whether the problematic nature of this passage is overstated in these comments or not, it is certainly a text that has proven to be resistant to all efforts at elucidation. Of the two cola that make up this bicolon, the more troublesome is clearly the second, in particular the last word. The context of the passage provides some help for making sense of it. The second part of v. 8 mentions the horses and the “victorious chariot” (h[wvy ˚ytbkrm) that Yahweh mounts as he prepares to do battle with Sea/River (v. 8ba) (4). Since v. 9a comes just after this colon, it is likely that it continues the theme of gearing up for battle. The fact that “your bow” (˚tvq) occurs in the first colon of v. 9a sets up the reader to expect a continuation of the preparation for battle motif in the second colon. The occurrence of more weapon vocabulary in this colon — viz., twfm (5) — indicates that such an expectation is well founded. 1. The First Colon The meaning of the first two words in the first colon of 3,9a is somewhat controverted. According to the MT the second word, the verb, is a form of the root rw[, “to rouse, awake,” which is supported by Codex Barberini, Syr, and Vg. This form is sometimes explained by claiming that rw[ here is a by-form of the root yr[ (6), “to be bare, naked” (7). But no other occurrence of this alleged root is attested in Hebrew. As for hy:r][,, as vocalized in the MT it is a (1) For purposes of discussion I omit here the hl;s, at the end of this colon. (2) Cited in T. HIEBERT, God of My Victory: The Ancient Hymn in Habakkuk 3 (HSM 38; Atlanta 1986) 26. (3) D. PARDEE, “The Semitic Root mrr and the Etymology of Ugaritic mr(r) || brk”, UF 10 (1978) 262 n. 78. (4) The placement of the word-pair sws and bkrm (Isa 2,7; Jer 4,13; Mic 5,9; Nah 3,2; Hag 2,22) in two cola, with ˚ysws in the first colon and ˚ytbkrm in the second, causes some awkwardness. In no case should one read the bicolon as if it meant that Yahweh mounted the horses, but rather that he mounted his horse-drawn chariot. Here either ˚ytbkrm should be read as ˚tbkrm (the singular) or one should understand the plural as some kind of elative construction. As Hiebert comments: “It is best to understand this bicolon as containing ‘imagistic parallelism’ . . . in which the poet does not seek to refer to two separate acts but to a single act described with two related images” (God of My Victory, 24). (5) The correctness of this assertion does not depend on how one translates this term, i.e., whether as “maces” or “arrows”. (6) I designate the last radical of the root by a yod rather than a he in order to distinguish the third-weak root from a root in which the third radical is a consonantal he, not the mater lectionis, such as Hbg, Hgn, etc. (7) BDB, 735.