“Thou art of purer eyes than to behold evil, and canst not look on iniquity: wherefore lookest thou upon them that deal treacherously, and holdest thy tongue when the wicked devoureth the man that is more righteous than he?”
You who are of purer eyes than to behold evil and cannot look on wrong, why do you look on traitors and remain silent when the wicked swallow up the righteous?—Habakkuk returns to the foundational complaint: God's holiness seems incompatible with God's tolerance of injustice and with using wicked Babylon against relatively righteous Judah. The theological coherence Habakkuk seeks—between God's moral perfection and God's apparent tolerance of evil—remains unresolved by divine explanation. The verse articulates the deepest theodicy question: how can a holy God accommodate cosmic injustice?
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