Habakkuk 2:4

Hebrew Bible

2 The Lord responded: “Write down this message. Record it legibly on tablets so the one who announces it may read it easily. 3 For the message is a witness to what is decreed; it gives reliable testimony about how matters will turn out. Even if the message is not fulfilled right away, wait patiently; for it will certainly come to pass—it will not arrive late. 4 Look, the one whose desires are not upright will faint from exhaustion, but the person of integrity will live because of his faithfulness. 5 Indeed, wine will betray the proud, restless man! His appetite is as big as Sheol’s; like death, he is never satisfied. He gathers all the nations; he seizes all peoples. 6 “But all these nations will someday taunt him and ridicule him with proverbial sayings: ‘Woe to the one who accumulates what does not belong to him (how long will this go on?)—he who gets rich by extortion!’

Romans 1:17

New Testament

15 Thus I am eager also to preach the gospel to you who are in Rome. 16 For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is God’s power for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. 17 For the righteousness of God is revealed in the gospel from faith to faith, just as it is written, “The righteous by faith will live.” 18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of people who suppress the truth by their unrighteousness, 19 because what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them.

 Notes and References

"... We have already seen that Paul’s use of ἐκ πίστεως in Romans 1:17a is correlated tightly with his citation of Habakkuk 2:4 in 1:17b, a text that uses the same phrase. This correlation explained the web of identical and similar prepositional expressions spread through Romans and Galatians (if not beyond), including 3:22; indeed, it was this broader correlation that established the instrumentality of the key phrase ἐκ πίστεως especially clearly (and that also largely explains the statistical dominance of πιστ- over ὑπακου- terms in these texts). But it remains to be seen whether the christological explanation that I have supplied for that instrumental function is now sustainable through 1:17b—a question that has not yet been answered. Can Paul’s citation of Habakkuk 2:4 there be oriented christologically? Once again, it seems that good reasons may be added in support of this suggestion ... It is also worth noting that the Wisdom of Solomon speaks at some length of “a righteous man” who suffers and is then granted life by God (see esp. 2:12–20 and, a little less directly, 3:1–9; 4:7–16; 5:1, 15). And since the text in which this story is embedded is deeply implicated in the opening chapters of Romans, it seems likely that the letter’s auditors would hear echoes of the righteous figure from that story when Paul cited Habakkuk 2:4 in Romans 1:17 ..."

Campbell, Douglas A. The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul (pp. 861-864) William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2009

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