Job 12:15 - Exposition

Behold, he withholdeth the waters, and they dry up . God, at his pleasure, causes great droughts, which are among the worst calamities that can happen. He withholds the blessed rain from heaven ( Deuteronomy 11:17 ; 1 Kings 8:35 ; 1 Kings 17:1 ), and the springs shrink, and the rivers dry up, and a fruitful land is turned into a desert, and famine stalks through the land, and men perish by thousands . Also he sendeth them out, and they overturn the earth ; i.e. he causes floods and inundations. Once upon a time he overwhelmed the whole earth, and destroyed almost the entire race of mankind, by a deluge of an extraordinary character, which so fixed itself in the human consciousness, that traces of it are to be found in the traditions of almost all the various races of men. But, beside this great occasion, he also in ten thousand other cases, causes, by means of floods, tremendous ruin and devastation, sweeping away crops and cattle, and even villages and cities, sometimes even "overturning the earth," causing lakes to burst, rivers to change their course, vast tracts of land to be permanently submerged, and the contour of coasts to be altered.