Habakkuk

What Does the Name Habakkuk Mean?

Habakkuk is the English form of the Hebrew name Ḥăvaqqûq (חֲבַקּוּק), borne by the prophet whose book is the eighth of the Twelve Minor Prophets. The customary meaning is "embrace," from the Hebrew root חבק (ḥ-b-q), "to embrace" or "to clasp." The name has a doubled final consonant and a reduplicated shape, which some read as an intensive form, hence "ardent embrace."

The etymology is disputed. A competing proposal connects the name with the Akkadian ḫabbaqūqu, a plant name variously identified as a gourd-like or thorny plant, which would make it a plant word rather than a verb-derived name. Because the Greek and Latin versions transliterated the name rather than translating it, the "embrace" sense rests entirely on the Hebrew derivation and on later symbolic readings of it, so the meaning is best treated as uncertain.

Habakkuk Name History & Origins

In the Hebrew Bible the name belongs to the eighth of the Twelve Minor Prophets. It stands in the opening superscription of his book (Habakkuk 1:1) and again at 3:1, but the text supplies no biography; its setting is a dialogue between the prophet and God about the rise of the Babylonians. The community at Qumran read the book as prophecy about its own time and wrote a running commentary on it, the Pesher Habakkuk (1QpHab), one of the better-preserved Dead Sea Scrolls.

Greek and Latin transmission produced the forms that fed later European Bibles. The Septuagint transliterated the name as Ἀμβακούμ (Ambakoum), and the Latin Vulgate used Habacuc. From these come spellings such as Ambacum and Habacuc in medieval and early modern translations.

A separate tradition outside the Hebrew canon links Habakkuk with Daniel. In the Greek additions to Daniel known as Bel and the Dragon, an angel lifts the prophet by his hair and carries him to Babylon to bring food to Daniel in the lions' den. The story was taken up in Jewish and Christian tradition and remains part of the Catholic and Orthodox Old Testaments, while it is absent from the Protestant Bible. Habakkuk also receives a brief notice in the ancient Jewish-Christian work known as the Lives of the Prophets.

In English the name reached its familiar spelling in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Wycliffe's version used Abacuk, the Douay-Rheims Habacuc, and the Geneva Bible and the King James Version of 1611 established Habakkuk. As a personal name in the English-speaking world it has stayed rare and is met mainly through the biblical book.