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PREFACE TO THE COMMENTARY ON HABAKKUK HILE THE present prophecy has also been devel- oped for us with great wisdom and skill, we shall find it concentrating on God’s management of things in a way becoming the saints. It becomes even the saints, in fact, to make the open admission, “It is not you who are speaking, but the Spirit of your Father speaking in you.” Now, for those wanting to have an understanding there is need of no little sagacity, since you would notice the drift of the prophecy giving birth in you to a twofold level of meaning, both spiritual and factual.1 For your benefit I shall, while keeping it brief, detail in advance the parts of the prophecy, and mention what their reference is; in this way readers would come to the meaning easily and meet with no difficulty. Israel, then, was considerably irked (69) by the predictions of the prophets; they were aware, in fact, they were aware that they would in due course become captive, fall into the hands of the foe, and be subjected to an unfamiliar slavery. The blessed Habakkuk actually tries to convey the fact that by a just decree of the God who controls all things, such a fate will in due course befall them, and with good reason. After all, they had personally preferred a wrongful life at variance with the Law, had adopted every form of dishonesty, and had not ceased developing in themselves a contaminated mind before the miserable fate befell them. He makes this clear by directing his criticism at those opting for an unholy life, making it, as it were, the focus and theme of his whole prophecy, and then introducing God to threaten those contemptuous of him with the assault 331 1. Mt 10.20. As usual, an Alexandrian commentator assumes that there are at least two levels of meaning in a text. In the case of Habakkuk, Cyril notes a preoccupation with divine providence or oikonomia, as will Theodoret. 332 CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA of the Babylonians. Since it was his duty, however, not only to take the role of prophet of harsh realities calculated to cause the utmost distress, and not only to take a public stance and predict that the worst of all possible disasters would befall them in due course, but also to provide a helpful description in advance of what would serve as a cure and to foretell the way the sufferers would be likely to gain respite, he deplores also the Babylonians’ cruelty itself and calls those people contemptuous who burnt down the divine Temple itself, ransacked the holy city, and made no exception of the sacred vessels. “Why do you gaze on the contemptuous,” he says, “[and] keep silence when the godless swallow the righteous?”2 With great wisdom he then proceeds (70) to mention also the capture of Babylon and the eventual redemption by Cyrus of the victims of unaccustomed servitude. From the individual redemption the treatment moves naturally to overall and generic redemption, namely, that achieved through Christ for all those redeemed by faith, who have set aside the yoke of sin and escaped a harsh and inflexible master in Satan. You thus have a brief synopsis of the drift of the whole prophecy; we shall expound it by dealing with each part as far as we can.3 2. 1.13. 3. Theodoret will follow Cyril in identifying Habakkuk’s “theme” (hypothesis) and “drift, purpose” (skopos), whereas Theodore initially notes the different genres in the work. ...

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