Job 38:28

Third long strophe MORTIFYING QUESTIONS AS TO THE ORIGIN OF METEOROLOGICAL PHENOMENA, THE CONSTITUTION AND CONTROL OF MIGHTY CONSTELLATIONS, AND THE CREATIVE COMMAND OF SO INSIGNIFICANT PHENOMENA AS THE CLOUDS OF JOB’S OWN SKY, Job 38:28-38. Predominant in this strophe is the twofold conception of power and wisdom which leads more particularly to questions as to the source of wisdom in man, ( Job 5:36,) the boasted counterpart of God.

α . Perhaps a human parentage may be found for the rain, the dew, the ice, and the hoar frost, and Job may be able to produce them at pleasure! Job 38:28-30.

28. The rain… the drops of dew The parentage of the rain and the dew is not with man, but with God. Jablonski declares that the enlightened Egyptian considered the moon to be the parent of dew a fact which gives emphasis to the question of the Almighty.

Begotten “The figure of generation, ” as Dr. T. Lewis remarks, “is kept up in הוליד , ‘ begotten.’

There has been a great lack of attention to the momentous fact that so much of this language of generation, or of evolution, or production by birth, (one thing coming out of another,) is employed in Scripture, not only in the poetical parts, such as Psalms 90:2; Psalms 104:0, Proverbs 8:22, and here in Job; but in the prose account of Genesis 1:0, ‘ The earth bringing forth; ’ ‘ the waters swarming with life;’ ‘ the Spirit brooding upon them;’ ‘the generations, תולדות , of the heavens and the earth.’” The questions of these two verses intimate that nature has within herself no life, or potency of life, except such as God himself imparts. Nor is matter the universal mother “who brings forth all things as the fruit of her own womb,” as Bruno (cited by Prof. Tyndall) would say, but rather a capacity for the evolving of life, and the various forms and qualities of life, either directly, by the creative will of God, or indirectly, according to divinely-devised laws, to which God originally imparted, or continues still to impart, life-giving power. The questions of these verses spring from the remarkable generalization, which true science now justifies, that there can be no life without semination. This thought the text transfers in figure to the formation of the rain and the dew, the ice and the hoar frost; even these dead forms or products of nature must have had an author.

Job 38:29 is an enlargement of the thought of the preceding verse. The variation in gender is accommodated to the idea that the ice and frost come forth from the earth, (see note, Job 1:21,) while the rain and drops of dew take their rise in heaven.