The life of St Habakkuk
Unlike most of the prophets before him, he is remembered less for pronouncing judgment outright than for wrestling openly with God over why the wicked so often seem to prosper.
During the war with Babylon he withdrew for a time to Arabia, and the fuller account of Daniel kept among the Church's Scriptures tells that while carrying food out to reapers there, Habakkuk was taken up by an angel and set down suddenly in Babylon itself, where the Prophet Daniel then lay shut in a den of lions for refusing to worship an idol; the food meant for the reapers instead reached and sustained Daniel in his ordeal. When the war had ended, Habakkuk returned to his own country and lived on to a great old age before his death. His relics were said to have come to light in the time of the Emperor Theodosius the Younger, discovered together with those of the Prophet Micah, and a portion of his prophecy still forms one of the odes sung in the Church's daily prayer.
