1. A prayer. This is actually a psalm, celebrating the power of YHWH as a warrior god. It looks very much like an editorial coda attached to Habakkuk’s prophecies, perhaps because whoever assembled the text felt that these brief poems needed a kind of rounding out. Some of the references are mythological and archaic, leading one to suspect this could be a much older poem. At several points the text looks badly scrambled, either because a scribe did not understand all of its archaic language or he tried to alter its mythological content.

the shigyonot. As is often the case in the Book of Psalms, the identity of this musical instrument is not known, although the verbal stem could suggest a rhapsodic or elevated state.

2. In these very years revive them. The argument is as follows: we have heard tell of Your great deeds on behalf of Israel in the past; now, in this moment of crisis, is the time to renew these deeds.

3. selah. This is a musical notation, again of unknown character, that often appears in Psalms.

4. the radiance is like light. The Hebrew nogah is poetic diction and often used for some sort of supernal light. Thus the poet explains that the nogah has the quality of what we usually identify as light.

Beams from His hand. While qarnayim usually means “beams of light,” here it probably indicates lightning bolts, wielded as a weapon by the warrior-god in many mythologies. That would explain the reference to hidden might in the next verset.

6. The ancient marches. The term halikhot can mean “ways,” “goings,” or “processions.” Given the martial context here, it probably refers to God’s marching fearsomely across the earth.

8. Neharim . . . / Yamm. Although in other contexts these two words can mean, respectively, “rivers” and “sea” (the usual plural of the former is neharot), here they hark back to Canaanite mythology, where they figure as different names for the primordial sea monster that must be subdued by Baal (in Israelite literature, by YHWH).

9. the seven Rods of Eimar. The Hebrew has ‘omer, “saying,” but the scribe has either erased or was ignorant of the mythological reference that has been identified by Umberto Casutto: in Ugaritic literature, Baal wields two rods called Eimar with which he strikes Nahar or Yamm.

10. The sky swears solemnly. This is a little puzzling. The literal sense of the Hebrew is “the sky raised its hand,” which is a gesture for taking a solemn oath. Perhaps the sky is swearing to witness, or participate in, the cataclysmic events unfolding.

11. Sun and moon stand still. They stand still in astonishment, but also their light is not needed because the radiance of God’s weapons lights up the world.

13. down to bedrock. The Masoretic Text has tsawʾar, “neck,” but razing has to move downward, not upward, so this is in all likelihood a mistake for tsur. The error would have been triggered by the fact that the word translated as “top” in the preceding verset has the more common meaning of “head.”

15. You made Your horses tread in the sea. This maneuver continues the cosmogonic battle between YHWH and Yamm that was invoked above.

16. I quaked within. Literally, “my belly quaked.”

Rot comes into my bones. This sounds odd, but the idea is probably that the bones became squishy, as though they had been eaten away by rot.

Will You rest. The Masoretic Text has “I will rest,” which would be peculiar, given the speaker’s terror at this moment. The translation adopts the proposal of Yitzhak Avishur that the Masoretic reading is a tiqun sofrim, a scribal euphemism, to avoid an expression that might seem to impugn God’s majesty.

17. For the fig tree does not bud. Some take this entire verse as a reference to a plague of locusts because of a certain similarity to the language of Joel, but it is perfectly plausible that the fields and the livestock would be devastated by an invading army, “when a people comes up to assault us” (verse 16).

18. But I in the LORD will exult. As in many of the psalms, there is a sharp reversal at the end: After the evocation of a landscape of terror, the speaker affirms his confidence in God’s rescuing power.

19. He makes my feet like the gazelle’s / and has me tread upon the heights. The language here is close to Psalms 18:34, which is a victory psalm. It seems that the celebration of YHWH as warrior god has slid into the proclamation of a human victor who praises God for giving him strength on the battlefield.

For the lead player, on stringed instruments. This is actually a superscription for introducing a psalm, not a formula for concluding it. One suspects that this chapter was copied from a noncanonical manuscript of psalms and that the copyist inadvertently included at the end a line that in fact belonged to the next psalm in the manuscript.