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"SO HE MAY RUN WHO READS IT"JOHN MARSHALL HOLT

AMERICAN SCHOOL OF ORIENTAL RESEARCH, JERUSALEM

"DERPLEXED and appalled by human suffering and wickedness a*- unable to turn his attention from them, the prophet Habakplaced himself in the posture of alert concentration characteristic prophet and waited for the guidance of God, who would show himmeaning of the situation. It came to him, and he understood himselcompelled to make the revelation known. The instruction is relatethe celebrated passage, 2 2

And the LORD answered me:"Write the vision;

make it plain upon tablets,so he may run who reads i t . . . . "

It is not a matter of importance at this point whether we are to unstand that Habakkuk indeed wrote out his message on tablets, as Ishad done (Isa 8 1). The question is one of our understanding rigthe expressed purpose of such declaration of the revelation, "so he run who reads it., , Translation and exegesis of the passage have nalways done justice to the force of the original. Even in the presencacceptably accurate translations, exegesis has at times imposed upontext an inversion of its emphasis, so that a meaning foreign to prophet's statement has been forced upon him.

The RSV translation, cited above, is as faithful as one could wIt reflects the traditional English rendering of the AV, "that he mrun that readeth it ." Ancient translations were equally successful. LXX reads, 7rcos ,) . Th e Vulgate has it, "u tpercurrat qui legerit eum." These translations unanimously follow the

words, the syntax , and the emphasis of the Hebrew, " Y^\ 15?.The subject of the verb, expressed by participles in the Hebrew and theGreek, by clauses in the English and the Latin, is the reader. The actionthat his reading of the divine revelation will enable him to perform is to"run." The main verb of the sentence, on which the principal stress lies,is *" ' his having read the message is adjectival and contributory,Kl ip I t only obscures the richest possible meaning of the clause to


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HOLT: "SO HE M AY RU N W H O READS IT" 299

is that one who reads it may be equipped, willing, or incited thereby torun. No t the reading, bu t the running of the reader is the contemplatedend of the revealing and the writing. It mus t be granted t ha t Habakk uk

is very economical with his language here, so that one must supply whatis not completely expressed in th e Hebrew, bu t that is pa rt of the functionof exegesis from the outse t. The interp reter need only be as cer tain ashe can that what he supplies preserves the thrust of the original as itmakes the details plainer. Ha bakk uk supplies the control necessary forthe interpreter when he makes ^ T the main verb. If syn tax is to haveany purpose at all, surely it must serve as a discipline for the interpreterto prevent his alteration of the essential meaning of his text.

Translations are available, however, that do not render the Hebrewfaithfully. Th ey exchange the syntactica l places of reading and runningand consequently invert the emphasis of the clause as a whole. Th eGerman of the Riessler-Storr translation reads, "dass jeder es gelufiglesen kann ." Similarly, the American Transl ation has it, "T ha t onemay read it on the run ." Th e Jerusalem Bible pu ts it, "pour qu'on lalise facilement." Wha t has happened is th at these trans lations make yy\\ into a part iciple, in effect, and shift Kl i p in to the place of the mainverb . Th us a different purpose appears for the revelation . Th e prophetmakes it plain for one to read, no matter at what speed or state of exciteme nt he ma y read it. A reader may be runn ing in panic, or he may lookonly in passing for a cursory glance, but the meaning will be obvious forhim. No longer is "ru nn ing " the intended result of one's "r ead ing ";rather, "run nin g" is here the att en da nt circumstance of "reading." Inthe Hebrew and the more accurate translations, the revelation is givenso that a reader may run; in the less accurate translations, so that arunner may read.

One might argue that the reciprocal transposition of "reading" and"running" is the result of the translator's own haste to reach the climactic2 4, to which the preceding verses lead th e way : the translator, so t ospeak, rushed past the preliminary material to give more careful attentionto the actual content of the message. A charge of slipshod work, however,is unnecessary. One need make no such excuses for the tran sla tor.Rather, the latter translations are transparently exegetical, in a mannerand to an extent beyond what is true of any translation, which in thenature of things is interpretive. Translat ions th at prom ote a participleto the status of main verb and put the main verb into the participle'splace, if not produced by carelessness, must be influenced by an interpre tat ion t hat does no t follow the guidelines of the original. Th e popula rity of this inverted exegesis is demons trated by its frequent appearance


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glance."1 Excellent earlier commentaries say much the same thinWard evidently thought no comment was necessary.2 But Davidsonwrites, "The speedy understanding of it will quiet minds that are p

plexed."3 Nowack's version of the line is, "damit man sie gelufig leskann."4 Horst has, "damit man im Laufe sie liest."5 Ntscher translates,"dass man ohne Anstoss sie lese."6 What we have here is a popular misinterpretation that, with some, persists even when they have a verbacorrect translation before them and, with others, impels them to althe perspective in their translations, regardless of the indignity done original expression.7

The trouble seems to come with the understanding of what it meain the biblical vocabulary for one to "run." The popular interpretatof 2 2 here held erroneous is evidently unwilling to think that the propintends for his message to cause its recipient to take off running in friand dismay. This kind of interpretation should be resisted, for Habkuk's conviction is that he has been given the message from God twill enable a man to stand fast and firm in the midst of the woes history. Fortunately, alongside the literal usage of ^ is its richlymetaphorical meaning. Once we place 2 2 in the context of the use off i l as a poetic image, the temptation to mistranslate and misinterpretdisappears.

The verb ^ occurs as a poetic device in several significant passagesin prophetic and wisdom literature. In Je r 23 21 it is descriptive of thefalse prophets' discharge of the function they thought assigned them.In Ps 19 6 t he sun runs its course in fulfillment of t he divine ap pointment.Ps 119 32 speaks of th e godly man's obedience to his God by running inthe designated righ t way. Isa 40 31 tells how those who have waited onthe LORD will then be able to run and to walk in God's service. "Walk-ing" and "running" are paired again in Prov 4 12 where t he son whofollows the wise father's instruction is promised a way free of the obstaclesof wickedness as he lives his life under God. In Ps 147 15 God's command-ing word runs swiftly in carrying out the divine will.

The noun ^ serves eloquently in Jer 8 6 to characterize the

1 Interpreter's Bible, 6, p. 987.2 W. H. Ward, ICC, Habakkuk, p. 13.3 A. B. Davidson, The Books of Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah ("Cambridge

Bible"), p. 76.4 W. Nowack, Die kleinen Propheten, p. 258.s Friedrich Horst, Die zwlf kleinen Propheten, p. 174.6 Friedrich Ntscher, Zwlfprophetenbuch, p. 120. Cf. also Ernst Seilin, Das Zwlf-

prophetenbuch, pp. 394, 396. The popular interpretation of the text has a venerable


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HOLT: "S O HE MAY RUN WHO READS IT" 301

waywardness and obst inacy of God's people, who insist on running thei rown course; and the same noun is found in a similar context in Jer 23 10.The reader of the Hebrew Bible probably thinks in this connection,also, of how the bodyguard of the king in the Hebrew court were desig-nated with the participle of ^ 11 , ' (" runn ers" ), as in I Sam 22 17an d numerous parallels. This extension of the idea of "running," however,is different from the poetic device that we find in the passages citedearlier.

There is probably no possibility of demonst rat ing the dependence ofany of these occurrences of } in the figurative sense on any of theothers, because of differences of da tes of composition. This must beacknowledged even in the face of the peculiarly striking use of the figurein Jeremiah, a man whose unsurpassed poetic felicity was often formativein later biblical tho ught and language. It seems more likely th a t psalm-ists, prophets, and sages could all draw on a Hebrew commonplaceexpression that spoke of living one's life in obedience to God, or dis-obedience as the case might be, as "wa lking" or "r un ni ng " more oftenthe former, to be sure, but the equivalence of the words is unmistakablein the literary parallelism of Second Isaiah and Proverbs. Th e Hebrewsthought of life under God, not as a static relationship, but as a dynamicmovement along one way or another: the right way or the wrong way,as human faithfulness or perversity came into play. Th e God of theBible has set up a way for his creation to live and act (both inanimatenature and human history). God's creatures live rightly or wrongly,depending upon the way God's or their own in which they walk orrun. I t is most natura l th at this manner of talking about life in general,as a course one travels on foot, should be a favorite one with a people

whose deepest and most sacred memories were those of travel ing on a journey of salvat ion from one land to another under the leadership oftheir God.

Habakkuk, too, could use this figure of speech. Th e revelation Godhad given him was that which would show the right way of life to those

who would receive the guidance. One who would read Ha bakkuk'smessage would be given an indication of the way to run; that is, shownhow to conduct himself. If we wish to paraphrase Habakkuk so as tomake his meaning accessible and not do violence to a fine and charac-teristic Hebrew metaphor, our choice must be something like, "so he who reads it may live obediently." Since that is hardly poetic, it would be

bet ter simply to translate accurately, as the LXX, Vulgate, AV, andRSV have done, and suit our exegesis to the text, not to an imaginary" h h d "


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no distress comparable to ours. Their Habakkuk Commentary placesthe emphasis where we would expect it to be in their thinking, on theright doctrines given to the teacher of righteousness, and where it should

be in keeping with the text, on the guidance of God toward a godly life:after the citation of the biblical verse follows, p l^H HTID 7 y D'fcurr v rny h)D na bx lymn new. At least the exegetesof Qumran did not resort to a reversed interpretation like that we herecall into question. 8

The persistence into early Christian usage of the image of one's lifeas the way one walks or runs is most readily seen in Paul's use of thelanguage in I Cor 9 24 27 and, somewhat allusively, Phil 3 13 14.

Habakkuk's Hebrew demands that we understand "running" as theend result of the act of revelation he records; it is a message that can be read and acted on by one in need of guidance. The "running" hecontemplates is that of one who has been shown the way, not of oneliterally running off in alarm or haste. The verb he uses and the associatednoun, p n and ^, occur in other OT material, sometimes withaccompanying words and phrases to make the meaning precise, but oftenalone without qualifiers, as terms that summon up their associatedideas without these being directly mentioned. The main import of thisfigurative "running" is doing a job, fulfilling an assigned task; in short,living one's life with its decisions and actions.

It is this common metaphor for living one's life that the prophet usedin Hab 2 2. The statement is quite compressed and telegraphic, but thatis no rarity in prophetic parlance; and the very commonness of the term

would make its meaning clear to Habakkuk's contemporaries. If we areto understand him adequately, we shall do well to let his language,especially when we can translate it without verbal difficulty, govern ourinterpretation of it.

8 Millar Burrows, J. C. Trever, and W. H. Brownlee, The Dead Sea Scrolls of St.Mark's Monastery, 1, pi. 58; contrast the freely and emphatically exegetical translationin G. Vermes, TL Dead Sea Scrolls in English, p. 236: "that he who reads may read itspeedily."


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