Habakkuk's song

Earlier this year I looked into Joshua Henson's look at Habakkuk 3's language, which he claimed for ABH. I figure it might be worth extending that to theology. The chapter has one. It is highly ancient, even Canaanite. I ask if it's truly ancient or just reactionary...

The consensus ABH corpus includes Psalm 18 (which might have come from the pre-Psalter "Jashar"), Psalm 68 (presently elohist), Exodus 15:1-18 (maybe with l. 19), Judges 5, and Deuteronomy 32-33. In ABH, YHWH is recalled as coming from the south.

Various projects as venture beyond ABH bring also Psalm 29. This is notable, or notorious, for treating YHWH as the god who assails the forces of death and violence at a sacred mountain, striking them with a storm, which storm restores life to the dead land. As is too well known to repeat here, these tropes trend northern. They are rife in Ugaritic lore (where the mountain is Zaphon) and in various stelae of the neoHittites (spread around the Cilician plain). Psalm 29 is I think considered CBH (it shares its mabbul flood with P/Genesis 6-11) but this may reflect the Canaani/Punic syncretism of preDeuteronomic Carmel (since the psalm is otherwise hardly Priestly).

Psalm 77 is also brought, despite also not itself being ABH; as to be read alongside the ABH Exodus lore. Habakkuk 3 (I think) evokes a canon CBH-era assemblage. These would assume the Deuteronomic Moses cycle and the coming of the House of David.

Gert Prinsloo has taken the above dataset, which I suspect most will agree is relevant; to deliver a highly spicy conclusion, that the author deliberately composed a ABH-style poem as reaction to Habakkuk 1-2. The chapter is "Towards an Intertextual Reading of Habakkuk 3" in Intertextuality as Reinterpreting. (We also learn here of the non-Septuagintal alternate translation of Habakkuk 3: "Barberini".) Habakkuk 1-2 leans upon Isaiah 1-39 (perhaps already assembled as such); Habakkuk 3 - for Prinsloo - leans mainly upon the ancient ABH core and some exceptions like that Punic song, as well as upon those first two chapters.

Henson might object that we can see scars of the archaist process in Psalm 78 which is properly CBH although pretending not to be. Henson didn't find such scars in Habakkuk 3.

But... this may be less that Habakkuk 3 was truly ABH, and more that Habakkuk 3 relied on so ABH-weighted a collection of poetry. Our poet might postdate MT's Psalm 78 but rejected it as a clumsy and unworthy effort. Other non-ABH had crept into the collection like our Psalm 29 and, Prinsloo adds, 74 and 77. Our poet allowed these because, let's face it, they're awesome.

It follows that Habakkuk 3 would have read the old songs in accordance with a Deuteronomic proto-history, which history consensus already suspects of existing, just without the Joshua and Judges we know, and of course without the Holiness content. Prinsloo sees his subject as an "inset poem" but in a prophetic book and not, as usual, the narratives. Mind, other prophetic books have included their own psalmic content that doesn't read like the usual oracles.