_First:_ the great majority of critics take the wrong complained of in vv. 2-4 to be wrong done by unjust and cruel Jews to their countrymen, that is, civic disorder and violence, and believe that in vv. 5-11 Jehovah is represented as raising up the Chaldees to punish the sin of Judah—a message which is pretty much the same as Jeremiah’s. But Habakkuk goes further: the Chaldees themselves with their cruelties aggravate his problem, how God can suffer wrong, and he appeals again to God, vv. 12-17. Are the Chaldees to be allowed to devastate for ever? The answer is given, as above, in chap. ii. 1-4. Such is practically the view of Pusey, Delitzsch, Kleinert, Kuenen, Sinker,[314] Driver, Orelli, Kirkpatrick, Wildeboer and Davidson, a formidable league, and Davidson says “this is the most natural sense of the verses and of the words used in them.” But these scholars differ as to the date. Pusey, Delitzsch and Volck take the whole passage from i. 5 as prediction, and date it from before the rise of the Chaldee power in 625, attributing the internal wrongs of Judah described in vv. 2-4 to Manasseh’s reign or the early years of Josiah.[315] But the rest, on the grounds that the prophet shows some experience of the Chaldean methods of warfare, and that the account of the internal disorder in Judah does not suit Josiah’s reign, bring the passage down to the reign of Jehoiakim, 608—598, or of Jehoiachin, 597. Kleinert and Von Orelli date it before the battle of Carchemish, 506, in which the Chaldean Nebuchadrezzar wrested from Egypt the Empire of the Western Asia, on the ground that after that Habakkuk could not have called a Chaldean invasion of Judah incredible (i. 5). But Kuenen, Driver, Kirkpatrick, Wildeboer and Davidson date it after Carchemish. To Driver it must be immediately after, and before Judah became alarmed at the consequences to herself. To Davidson the description of the Chaldeans “is scarcely conceivable before the battle,” “hardly one would think before the deportation of the people under Jehoiachin.”[316] This also is Kuenen’s view, who thinks that Judah must have suffered at least the first Chaldean raids, and he explains the use of an undoubted future in chap. i. 5, _Lo, I am about to raise up the Chaldeans_, as due to the prophet’s predilection for a dramatic style. “He sets himself in the past, and represents the already experienced chastisement [of Judah] as having been then announced by Jehovah. His contemporaries could not have mistaken his meaning.”