You marched through the earth in fury;
Habakkuk 3:12
you threshed the nations in anger.
Habakkuk depicts God like an army marching across the earth in conquest.
A Marching Army
Habakkuk describes God as marching (Hebrew צעד, tza’ad). Other passages depict God marching in judgment. For instance:
LORD, when you went out from Seir,
Judges 5:4
when you marched (tza’ad) from the region of Edom,
the earth trembled
and the heavens dropped,
yes, the clouds dropped water.
Similarly, Isaiah 63:1 depicts God marching from Edom with his garments dripping red.
God isn’t the only one who marches. David brought the Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem. “And when those who bore the ark of the LORD had gone six steps, he sacrificed an ox and a fattened animal” (2 Samuel 6:13). Literally, they “stepped (tza’ad) six steps (tza’adim)”, using both the verb and noun forms.
Marching Branches
There’s a hard-to-translate verse that uses this word. Before his death, Jacob blessed each of his sons. He began Joseph’s blessing like this:
Joseph is a fruitful bough,
Genesis 49:22
a fruitful bough by a spring;
his branches run over the wall.
The word translated branches is literally “daughters”. Our word, tza’ad, is translated “run” (some translate it “climb”). The other strange thing is that the verb is singular while the subject is plural. With all this in mind, we could translate it “daughters marches upon a wall”. Why would translators translate it so different from the original? The phrase “fruitful bough” is literally “son of bearing fruit”. What bears fruit? A vine or bough. The translators take the “daughter” as being offshoots of the vine (a branch). Vines “march” by growing up a wall.
Threshing
In a similar vein, Habakkuk describes God threshing nations in his anger. Threshing is a process that breaks apart stalks of grain. It’s done by driving something heavy over the stalks, like a cart (Isaiah 28:28) or using a threshing sledge with sharp teeth on the bottom. This common task is not mentioned literally too often in the Bible. Ornan was threshing wheat when David came to buy his threshing floor to stop a plague (1 Chronicles 21:20).
More often, threshing is used metaphorically (like in Habakkuk) to describe threshing people and land (See Isaiah 41:15, Amos 1:3, Micah 4:13). Gideon says he will thresh (ESV “flail”) the flesh of the leaders of Succoth for not helping him as he pursued his enemies (Judges 8:3). Being threshed does not sound like fun!
To Ponder…
What do you think of the image of God marching out and threshing nations? Is it good because he is finally punishing them for their crimes? May we repent and not need to be threshed!