The clause מן־יהוה צבאות (mē-’ēt YHWH ṣĕbā’ôt, “from the LORD of hosts”) grounds the oracle’s irony in divine sovereignty: the nations’ labor is not merely futile in a general sense, but futile as ordained and exposed by the God whose lordship orders history. The verse asks, rhetorically, whether such a condition can be other than the Lord’s doing. The following cola explain the point by parallelism: peoples “toil for fire” and nations “weary themselves for emptiness.” The imagery of fuel and vanity is deliberately harsh; what has been gathered so industriously will feed destruction, and what has been pursued so arduously will evaporate into nothing. The point is not that all human labor is intrinsically meaningless, but that labor directed against the Lord’s purpose, or built into anti-God imperial ambition, ends under his judgment in self-consuming futility. The verbs sharpen this theological claim. יִיגְעוּ (yîgĕ‘û, Qal imperfect 3mp) and יִעָפוּ (yî‘āfû, Qal imperfect 3mp) describe weary exertion and eventual exhaustion, while בְּדֵי (“for the sufficiency of,” or idiomatically “for”) indicates a result or product. The striking phrase בְּדֵי־אֵשׁ, “for fuel of fire,” and the corresponding בְּדֵי־רִיק, “for fuel of emptiness,” compress the judgment into vivid, almost proverbial form. The parallel does not contrast two different destinies so much as intensify one verdict: the nations’ projects are destined to become the very material of their own undoing. In the context of Habakkuk 2, this serves the broader taunt against the oppressor, showing that Babylon’s apparent mastery is already swallowed up by the decree of the Lord of hosts.