Habakkuk 1:8

"Their horses also are swifter than leopards, and are more fierce than the evening wolves; and their horsemen press proudly on: yea, their horsemen come from far; they fly as an eagle that hasteth to devour. They come all of them for violence; the set of their faces is forwards; and they gather captives as the sand."

A careful reading of these verses shows no evidence whatever of their being any such thing as an eye-witness account of what the prophet had already seen in the past. The feature of these verses is their quality of mystery and enigma. Habakkuk was not describing a conquest he had witnessed, but was reporting an inspired vision from God, as the first verse of the prophecy stated. As Watts truly discerned, "The description is more stereotyped than historical."[19] It is similar to the prophetic picture of the advance of God's armies in Isaiah (Isaiah 5:26-30), and Jeremiah (Jeremiah 4:13). The message behind the lines is that the finger of the Almighty is moving in history. The Second head of the Scarlet Sea Beast will be succeeded by the Third.

In the character of Assyria, Habakkuk could have read that of Babylon, both of them being, in essence, the same entity. Nevertheless, that entity is controlled and directed from heaven. "The crisis that God will resolve is related to the events of history, but it is much deeper than anything that history alone can record."[20]

The specifics here, the effective use of cavalry (the military equivalent of tanks in those ages), the pressing relentlessly forward for attack, the swiftness and suddenness of attack, and the gathering of innumerable captives - such specifics do not describe any particular siege, but all sieges, all of those things being inherent in the prophecy that the Chaldeans would destroy Judea.

"The set of their faces is forwards ..." This version (ASV) is far preferable to some of the translations which have been proposed for this difficult verse. One manuscript makes it read, "The set of their faces eastward"; but as Taylor aptly suggested, someone probably "altered a passage to make a reference to the Greeks."[21]