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to content knowledgable editors

The stub template was added to this article in March 2005 and the text has not expanded since that time. Should we assume that the article is reasonably comprehensive for top level concepts related to the topic and that it is merely lacking detail? If yes, then the article could be removed from the stub category, having graduated from it. Thanks for the input. Courtland 13:43, 13 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The article says his book, which consists of five oracles about the Chaldeans (Assyrians), but in the context of Habukkuk's prophecy, weren't the Chaldeans the Babylonians?

The Chaldeans were one of two Babylonian cultures. The other group were the Akkadians. You are correct that they are not the same as the Assyrians. --EncycloPetey 00:39, 14 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I added an item to this article about the eighteen emendations of the Sopherim (actrually there were more than eighteen) in which the professional Jewish scribes say they changed part of the text because it appeared to show disrespect for God. Habakkuk 1:12 was a case in point, and I made a notation accordingly--to show that the original reading was "You [God] do not die" rather than "we shall not die"--but my addition was removed. Why? Dougie monty (talk) 07:27, 27 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

This article is about the person/prophet; it is not about the scriptual text. --EncycloPetey (talk) 14:15, 27 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

This article is mostly biblical, but do you think it would be ok to add a cross reference to Project Habakkuk in the "See Also" section? Does the link from the disambiguation link cover that? The Project Habakkuk article has the quote "I am going to do something in your days that you would not believe, even if you were told." (Habakkuk 1:5, NIV)" with a cross reference to this article. AdderUser (talk) 21:48, 21 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Probably not. The Habakkuk article is about the prophet, and the reference is to the Book of Habakkuk, which is what is actually linked from the Project Habakkuk article. (see the coding) --EncycloPetey (talk) 23:44, 21 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

User:Bedrock, if we're going to have the infobox contain a date for Habakkuk's death, and a citation to "Coffman (1982)", would it be possible to give a fuller citation, indicating perhaps the title of the work you're quoting, and so on?

(None of this should be taken as approval of the addition of the date; I'm just saying if we're going to have a citation, let's make it clear where the reader can find the information.)Alephb (talk) 01:21, 23 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Please keep first sentences simple perthis and many, many other discussions. Jytdog (talk) 04:04, 25 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

As secondary sources in the article now make clear, Habakuk's historicity is not certain; we do know where the text originated or how it arrived at the received form. Jytdog (talk) 04:05, 25 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

In what sense. The cited sources say that we do not know the author's actual name, because "Habakkuk" may be a pen name or pseudonym. They do not say that the book had no author or that the author had no name. "Habakkuk" is simply the name of convenience used to refer to the author in the absence of any other identification. That is, we know the book had (at least one) author, and scholars use the name "Habakkuk" to refer to this author because that is the only name we have. The author is not named or described elsewhere in the Masoretic text.

The article is titled "Habakkuk" for this reason. It is the name used for the author of the book. --EncycloPetey (talk) 04:07, 25 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Here is a discussion I had previously with another editor on the subject of Habakkuk's "historicity" (copied from my talk page):

I could cite several dozen other scholarly sources identifying the author, but having a string of citations in the summary section would be more a distraction than a benefit. Quibbling over the name attached to the author of this work is pointless. The book of Habakkuk was written, and this is a fact. Someone must have written it, and we call that person Habakkuk. No details about this person are certain, but there are traditions about the author, and inferences made from the content of the book. Saying that the book is "attributed to" Habakkuk indicates nothing useful. "Habakkuk" is the name by which the author of this book is known, and is the only name by which he is known, whoever he may have been. If you were talking about the Pentateuch (Torah) being attributed to Moses, then I would completely agree with "attributing" the book to him. If we were talking about the Athenian Society's translation of Aristophanes being "attributed" to Oscar Wilde, then I would agree. But for the book of Habakkuk, the issue is fruitless. Someone is the author, and the name scholars give to that author is Habakkuk, even though we don't know whether that was his name, whether it was a pseudonym, or someone [of some] other circumstance. --EncycloPetey (talk) 12:19, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for replying, but you seem to be just writing what you think, and working with some modern notion of "authorship" that is not relevant to discussions of texts from the ANE. See for example JSTOR 20503922 which cites Susan Niditch's important work Oral Word and Written Word (ISBN 978-0664219468), as well as JSTOR 27913658, JSTOR 27913832, and many, many discussions of this issue in the scholarly literature. We don't even know if people described in HB as prophets wrote anything at all, or there were scribes contemporary with some of them wrote down things they said, or if things passed through oral tradition and were eventually written down and ascribed to various people who were perhaps by then legends...... and even after things were written, how they were copied and redacted later. Isaiah is a great example (it is generally accepted that there at least very different traditions now gathered in the Isaiah corpus)... and even in Habakkuk it is unclear if III was "originally" (?) part of the same text.. and some scholars go deeper and find a great deal of redaction and editing in the received text. We don't know how the received text of any HB content came to be. Jytdog (talk) 19:45, 25 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

No, I have added material cited from multiple secondary sources. [What does "HB" stand for in your last reply; you did not explain. I assume either the book or the author or both?] All information in the article has been painstakingly researched in the published literature, and any point can be cited to multiple sources. Your proposed changes would alter the content of the article while leaving the current citations in place, thus making false claims about what the cited sources say. That is never acceptable on Wikipedia. Claims must be cited to sources, and all claims currently are so cited from reliable secondary literature. (Except possibly some of the text in the "Islam" section, which was added recently.)

Isaiah as an example I understand and agree with, but you are missing the point about authorship of the Book of Habakkuk. For this book, there is simply a tag at the front identifying the book as the work of "Habakkuk", who is not described or discussed anywhere in the Masoretic text other that the verse naming him author of this book. Therefore "Habakkuk" is used in reference to whomever the author of this book was. Yes, there is a great deal of scholarship arguing for or against the unity of the Book, especially as regards Hab. III, but that is an issue to be discussed in the article about the text, not about the author. Any conjecture concerning how the text came to be assembled is likewise beyond the scope of this article; it properly belongs in the separate article about the text.

It might help if you imagine this article as being titled "The author of the Book of Habakkuk, whose real name is uncertain, but is named in all published works as Habakkuk, since that is the only identification he has ever been given." But that title, though more precise, would be needlessly long an cumbersome for an article about the author of the Book of Habakkuk. And since the author is normally referred to as "Habakkuk" in all the published literature, the simpler name for the article is used. --EncycloPetey (talk) 22:54, 25 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

HB = Hebrew Bible. The field does not agree - at all - that there is one author for the book and you acknowledge this above. Yet you keep talking about "the author". Why? Jytdog (talk) 23:39, 25 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I see that you have made 154 edits to this page; the next most prevalent contributor has 21. That is not a bad thing, but I understand more what is happening now. The article has reflected your perspective on this for a long time. Jytdog (talk) 23:56, 25 February 2018 (UTC) (redact Jytdog (talk) 02:22, 26 February 2018 (UTC))[reply]

Re: HB, thanks for clearing that up. The field does not agree on the unity of the text, this is true. But I keep refering to "the author" and "Habakuk" because that is the subject of the article. How many of my "edits" were merely reversion of vandalism?

The fact that this article has received relatively little attention from anyone else is a reflection of its lying outside the mainstream of most WP editing. In editing, I have deliberately sought out as many sourced viewpoints as I can find, even to tracking down copies of articles and books from differing cultures and perspectives. That is what the article reflects. My own personal views are not cited anywhere in the article because I am unpublished on this topic. Shifting to personal attacks instead of discussing the content is not a suitable approach for successful discussion on WP. If you have a specific source saying something about Habakkuk, then cite it. Everything you've said thus far has been either unsourced or else not about Habakkuk. --EncycloPetey (talk) 00:05, 26 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

To be clear, the hat note says the page is about "Habakkuk, a biblical prophet". That it is about "the author" appears to be your construction and this is where the disagreement lies.

And there is no personal attack. I was describing the history of the page. One always should be aware of the historical context when one starts working on a page. Jytdog (talk) 00:19, 26 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Saying I "have made 154 edits" is describing the history of the page, but claiming that the "article has reflected your perspective ... for a long time" is an accusation and attack, not a description of the history of the page. You have leapt from a fact to making an unsupported inference, which is not to be done either in discussion or in writing of articles.

"The Biblical prophet" and "author of the book" are one and the same. The cited sources agree on this, and a single sentence in the HB proclaims both to be the same. It is the only sentence in the HB about Habakkuk. All of this is amply cited in the article. So there is no disagreement, merely expediency of keeping the hatnote brief for disambiguation purposes rather than constituting a biography in its own right. A hatnote serves for purposes of disambiguation, not as an article summary; there will always be information missing from a hatnote.

So, do you have some information for the article and a backing citation, or not? --EncycloPetey (talk) 00:57, 26 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I am uninterested in drama and have struck the thing that is distracting you.

It makes sense for this page to be about the prophet-figure about which something can be said (eg the nachleben of the character in Jewish, christian, islamic tradition - for example the legends about the burial place). It makes no sense for this page to be the "author" about whom we know nothing. If we need to have an RfC that would be fine. Jytdog (talk) 02:22, 26 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

So, you don't have citable content to add, then? --EncycloPetey (talk) 04:22, 26 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

the re-arrangements I made already were per the sources, about Habakkuk. Would be happy to develop this. The Book of Habakkuk needs work along these lines as well. Jytdog (talk) 04:31, 26 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

You changed text without citing those changes to any sources. I am asking you to provide citations to support any specific changes you made. You still have yet to do so for even a single change that you proposed. So, from my perspective, what you are proposing to do is change the article without citing any source for any of those changes, and (worse yet) leave the current citations in place even though the currently cited sources do not support the changes you would make.

If you will not (or cannot) back any of your changes with supporting citations, then you should not be making those changes. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, and we want the content to be supported by reliable secondary sources, and to make clear what those sources are and where they make the statements that we include from them.

Even worse, when you significantly alter the text of an article (any article), while leaving the citations in place that were there before, you are misleading the reader. For you are then claiming that the source makes the new claims that you have added, even though they make no such claims. The article has thus been transformed into a lie with the semblance of the truth. No claim that comes out of an editors own head should be substituted in place of the cited content. The content that is cited is content that came from the cited source, and it should remain so. --EncycloPetey (talk) 15:10, 26 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

We are going to start dispute resolution soon.

Before doing so, it would be useful if we could agree on what we are disagreeing about. In my view, our dispute is that:

a) you understand that it is accepted knowledge that Habakkuk the prophet is the author of the Book of Habakkuk

b) I understand that it is accepted knowledge that we know little about the prophet Habakkuk and we don't know who "authored" the book (authored in quotes because most scholars think it is unlikely that there was one author).

Please let me know if you would define the dispute differently. Jytdog (talk) 16:59, 26 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that we know little about the prophet Habakkuk, and this is acknowledged and cited in the article as it now stands. So there is no disagreement there. If you claim that "most scholars think it is unlikely that there was one author", we need a supporting citation to add that information to Wikipedia. What you understand and what the literature says may differ, in which case we rely on the literature and not personal understanding.

I would define the dispute thus:

a) I understand that the article has statements cited from reliable published sources.

b) You wish to remove some cited statements and replace them with uncited ones.

--EncycloPetey (talk) 20:04, 26 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Your statement above leaves no way to resolve this. it also misrepresents what I wrote, as I provided refs above for the uncertainty about authorship. Our mission is to communicate accepted knowledge. It is not accepted knowledge that Habakkuk wrote the Book of Habakkuk. This is a fairly easy matter to handle via some DR method. What method would you prefer to take? Jytdog (talk) 01:33, 28 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

btw about your edit note here, as i noted above your last statement kind of closes off dialogue, and i was figuring out how I should respond... Jytdog (talk) 01:37, 28 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, it does leave a way to resolve this: Cite a source that says what you claim. You have repeatedly failed to do so despite repeated requests for citations. If you continue to remove cited content, and refuse to cite sources, this will go to arbitration. --EncycloPetey (talk) 01:38, 28 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

What DR method would you like to take? Again I have provided sources above. yet more anon...Jytdog (talk) 01:39, 28 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Which source states that "Habakkuk is described in the Book of Habakkuk"? You have linked to sources, but you have not cited your claim. --EncycloPetey (talk) 01:41, 28 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Just one example - this is from the chapter on The Prophetic Literature" in the Jerome Bible Commentary (p197) "The prophetic literature does not consist of books written by literary authors in the same way that thebook Ruth, say, is by a deterimined literary author, or even the Gospel of John. The names appearing at the heads of prophetic books do, with some nuances, identify the substance of the words therein contained with the distinct prophets. However these prophetic words are, in the main, the collected and edited memorabilia of the prophets, themselves. They are the result of the editorial joining of the smaller collections of prophecies that have beenconnected by catchwords, similarity of topic, literatry form, or some similar consideration" Could these collections have made by the prophets themselves? It is not impossible, but it is unlikely, as an examination of individual prophetic "books" tends to show".

That is, in the main, the approach of modern scholarship to "authorship" of prophetic books. It is useful to talk about the final form (very useful!) but not so much , who exactly put the texts in that form or who exactly "authored" them. It is an anachronistic and really inappropriate concept any more. Again please do see the refs above and the Niditch book, which is an important summary of how scholars today think about how the HB was put together.

Marvin Sweeney, in JSTOR 1518680 provides a pretty good summary of debates over unity of the structure and layers of redaction in Hab. Jytdog (talk) 02:00, 28 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I am aware of Sweeney's article, and the debate. But none of this answers the question you have been asked: What source says that Habakkuk "is described in" the Book of Habakkuk? There are sources that state he is the author, and such a source has been cited (though you keep removing it). There are also sources concerning the debate over the overall unity of the book in regards to the third chapter, and this matter is contested in the literature. Yet the question remains: Can you actually cite a source that supports your claim? So far the answer is "no". --EncycloPetey (talk) 02:06, 28 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I see. Yeah so that language can be improved to something like "; prophecies ascribed to him are presented in the Book of Habakkuk" or the like. That would be fine. Jytdog (talk) 02:11, 28 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

It would be OK if you can find a source that backs such a claim. You have yet to supply a citation supporting such a change. --EncycloPetey (talk) 02:21, 28 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Heck that is what the book of habakkuk itself says. The jstor sweeney ref would do as well. We just don't need the notion of "authorship" at all here. Jytdog (talk) 02:24, 28 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

You are handwaving again. Please cite support for your claim. I would also point out that you are now advocating the removal of one side of the debate in favor of another side, rather than maintaining NPOV, and that would violate WP policy just as much as your removal of cited claims in favor of uncitable claims. --EncycloPetey (talk) 02:51, 28 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Those are two sources; the primary source itself and sweeney. Pretty any much source about the book of habakkuk will support "; prophecies ascribed to him are presented in the Book of Habakkuk" I cannot imagine who would find that statement controversial. Jytdog (talk) 02:58, 28 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

This again is handwaving and not a citation, and confusing at that. The primary source you mention is the Book of Habakkuk, and it states (1:1) that the book is "the oracle which Habakkuk the prophet saw", and (3:1) that the final chapter is "a prayer of Habakkuk". Given that you are now wanting to cite the primary source, I fail to understand why you object so strongly to the originally cited statement from Hirsch that Habakkuk is the author. We usually prefer citations from secondary sources over primary source citations. --EncycloPetey (talk) 03:26, 28 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Hm. Is this what you want?

Habakkuk was a prophet in the Hebrew Bible; prophecies ascribed to him are presented in the Book of Habakkuk, the eighth of the twelve minor prophets.^[1][2][3][4]

Kind of overkill, but there you go. Jytdog (talk) 05:23, 28 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

btw this course overview is a very solid summary of mainstream biblical scholarship. See especially the stuff in "IV LITERARY ISSUES AND AUTHORSHIP" starting at the bottom of page 3. Jytdog (talk) 05:26, 28 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Hello! I had no idea there was such a donnybrook over what I must confess is my least favorite book among the minor prophets (no offense intended to Mr. Habakkuk, of course!). I also must confess that I see a lot of merit in both sides of this debate; tradition certainly ascribes authorship to the named prophet (actually called a nabi, which is interesting), and in modern classes, when speaking of the author, it's perfectly normal to start "Habakkuk says...." By the same token, modern scholarship is divided on whether it is truly a unified work, its date, and basically everything else. I think new world encyclopedia is pretty emblematic when it calls the author "a largely enigmatic figure." [1]. So perhaps we could reach an agreement that ascribes authorship to Mr. Habakkuk, but also makes clear that this is the traditional view? Just a thought. Cheers. Dumuzid (talk) 16:48, 28 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Very fine for the body to say something like "traditionally, Habakkuk was considered the author" or the like. Just like Moses was traditionally considered to have authored the Torah. Jytdog (talk) 20:03, 28 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

He is what the cited source actually says:

HABAKKUK (; LXX. Ἀμβακούμ; Vulgate, "Habacuc"):

Prophet; author of the eighth in the collection of the twelve minor prophetical books ...

It says he is the author of the book; it says nothing about him being described. @Jytdog: Please do not alter statements when the cited source does not say what you claim. --EncycloPetey (talk) 01:36, 28 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

You can cherry pick sources all day. The issue here is that this is not scholarly consensus. It surely is the traditional view (and your 1906 ref there states the traditional view); that would be accurate to say. But not, in WP's voice, that he is the author. Jytdog (talk) 01:37, 28 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Please provide a citation stating the scholarly consensus you claim. Unsupported claims are not a basis for editing articles. First you tell me my view is "modern", now you say it is "traditional", but you have yet to support any claim you have added to the article, and continue to remove cited statements. --EncycloPetey (talk) 01:42, 28 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

What I said was, that you seem to be working with some modern notion of "authorship" (by "modern" i mean Modern history, beginning roughly in the renaissance, when we got the notions of X wrote Y that we still use today - like James Joyce authored Finnegan's Wake.) The notion that any "book" of the Bible was "authored" in this sense is not contemporary and is anachronistic - we don't think about them that way and haven't for a long time. Jytdog (talk) 02:23, 28 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Can you support your claim that "this sense is not contemporary and is anachronistic - we don't think about them that way and haven't for a long time".

I can provide 21st century citations that counter your claim. J. Gordon McConville (2002) "Exploring the Old Testament: A Guide to the Prophets", vol. 4, page 212 "It is not possible to be sure whether the Book of Habakkuk as a whole comes originally from the prophet. However, the book as it stands has a unity of theme, which we have begun to see. (...) We have begun to see a way of thinking of the book as a unity. One variation of the view outlined above is to see the sequence of oracles as set in the temple worship. That is, the prophet is a cultic prophet ('certainly a cultic prophet at the temple of Jerusalem', Lindblom 1962, p. 154; cf. Sweeney 1991). He puts the questions to Yahweh in a worship setting and receives oracular answers in the same context."

McConville acknowledges the debate, but suggests that the pendulum of opinion is now swinging the other way, back to unity, though we may never know the truth of the matter. It is therefore precipitous to claim that one view or the other is "modern", as opinion has swung back and forth many times on the issue. It is therefore also presumptuous to remove cited claims in favor of uncited ones. It is enough to acknowledge the debate over unity of the text at the appropriate place within the body of the article, and direct the reader to the article about the Book, where a full discussion of the debate can be presented. Some scholars hold that Habakkuk wrote the entire book, while some scholars hold otherwise, but the latter group of scholars say nothing definitive about the authorship of the disputed material. They merely hold that it was either written by some unspecified writer, or else was written at a different time that the rest of the book within claiming that a different individual did so.

So, again: Can you support your claim that "this sense is not contemporary and is anachronistic - we don't think about them that way and haven't for a long time"? Because I have shown here that not all scholars believe this today. --EncycloPetey (talk) 02:46, 28 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

What you just wrote there is what I have been saying, pretty much. It is very far from accepted knowledge that "Habakkuk is the author of the book of Habakkuk"; the "authorship" is not clear (how could it be?) . You will notice that each of those scholars spend way more time talking about what is going on in the text, and what its context(s) may have been, than on who actually wrote it. Jytdog (talk) 02:56, 28 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

RE: "each of those scholars spend way more time talking about what is going on in the text [...] than on who actually wrote it". This is another unsubstantiated claim, but I agree that scholars usually talk more about the text than about the author. This fact still does nothing to support the claims that you are wanting to insert into the article. I ask again, please provide a citation for your claim. --EncycloPetey (talk) 03:20, 28 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

That is a WEIGHT issue. But in any case it is not clear to me how you want to go forward. Are you OK with "and prophecies ascribed to him are presented in the Book of Habakkuk"? Please take some time and think about it. If not we can do DR. If you are not happy with it please think about what channel of DR you would like to pursue. Thx Jytdog (talk) 03:25, 28 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I want something cited from a source. If you wish to propose a new wording, simply cite a source for the change. As yet, you have failed to cite a source for your proposed change. --EncycloPetey (talk) 03:29, 28 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

ISBN 978-0300139730

(p 21) "Haak's (1991) claims that the entire book of Habbakuk is a single literary entity, even if overstated and unconvincing, are a remarkable index of how things have changed in biblical studies. Such claims were unthinkable for most of the literary critics of the twentieth century. We are prepared to argue for the thematic unity of the book in an overarching literary structure. But none of the familiar genres supplies the model for the whole book. "

(p 24) , he writes "Jöcken (1976:3-115) surveyed all the proposals that had been made for dating the book of Habakkuk up to the time of his study. The problem of dating the book has been posed in various ways, depending on whether it is viewed as a single composition or as a collection of loosely related but essentially independent pieces. In one case, the question is simple: When was the whole book written or least finished? In the other, the question has many parts: When was each portion written, and when were they joined together? Even more elaborate theories purport to trace the growth of the work over a perioid of many centuries. Beginning with the perspective of Habakkuk 3, which goes back to Creation and deals also with the Exodus, we have here an ancient composition that came down through tradition and was incorporated into the prophecy. The question of the origin and date of this material is distinct from the problem of the literary production of the book of Habakkuk as a whole. It will be enough to say that most of the hymnic material in Hab 3:3-15 could be premonarchical and that some of the Creation passages could go back to very remote Hebrew antiquity."

-- Jytdog (talk) 04:45, 1 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Premonarchical? These modern hippies and their crazy ideas! But seriously, that's a pretty high quality source, and seems to me a good precis of 20th century scholarship on the subject. As a side note, it's amazing to me how much violence the Hebew word "qeren" has done to otherwise good translations (see also "horned Moses"). Cheers. Dumuzid (talk) 13:44, 1 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]