If the book of Jonah might be seen as a counterbalance to the “Israel first” message of Nahum and Obadiah, we have an additional challenge to the mentality of “vindictive triumphalism” in the oracles of Habakkuk. Here’s a prophet who lives on the cusp of the Babylonian invasion of the land of Israel, around the turn of the 6th century B.C.E., his job being to make sense of it all. He’s like Nahum in concentrating his fire on Israel’s oppressors rather than on his own people; but he goes much farther, in raising the question of theodicy — the morality of God's actions.
