06_AN_Whitekettle_273_281_273_281 10/07/15 12:42 Pagina 276 276 RICHARD WHITEKETTLE there was something significant about the leaderlessness of aquatic ani- mals which Habakkuk wanted to convey. Third, when talking about a leadership crisis, Israelite authors talked about absent or bad leaders (which they characterized as shepherds) and about people (which they characterized as sheep) who had gone astray from their leaders or who were left helpless and vulnerable by their lead- ers 8. Thus, they thought of a leadership crisis as a matter of episodic lead- erlessness and used animals which illustrated that. When Habakkuk talked about a leadership crisis in 1,14, he deviated from the standard way that Israelite authors did this and used animals which are structurally leader- less. This suggests that he considered the precise nature of the leaderless- ness he was complaining about to be of importance. Fourth, structural leaderlessness in animals is mentioned in the Is- raelite textual record (Prov 6,6-8; 30,27). Thus, the Israelites, or at least some of them, recognized that there were different types of leaderlessness in the animal world. Since the unusual mention of aquatic animals and leaderlessness in 1,14 indicates careful and deliberate thought about these things (see the preceding three points), it is reasonable to assume that Habakkuk was one of the people in Israel who recognized that there were different types of leaderlessness in the animal world, and that he recog- nized that the leaderlessness of aquatic animals was structural and not episodic. Taken together, these four points make a robust case that the structural leaderlessness of aquatic animals was integral to the meaning of Hab 1,14. Assuming this, what must be determined is the human situation which Habakkuk was complaining about in 1,14. II. What the Complaint is About In order to identify the human situation which the complaint in Hab 1,14 was about, several things must be kept in mind. First, by complaining that a group of people had been made structurally leaderless, Habakkuk was complaining, not that the people now had absent or inept leadership, but that they now had no governance system at all. Second, the group of people that had been made structurally leaderless ends up under the gov- ernance and control of the Babylonians (1,15-17). Structural leaderless- ness, then, was a characteristic of the group itself, not of the group’s relationship to those outside the group. Third, since Habakkuk understood that the Babylonians were God’s instrument of judgment (1,12), the state of structural leaderlessness was brought about by the actions of the Baby- lonians. Fourth, the fisherfolk remove the aquatic animals from the water 8 E.g., Isa 13,14; Jer 10,21; Ezek 34; Mic 5,7 (ET 5,8); Nah 3,18; Zech 10,2.