Genesis 8:22

22. While the earth remaineth Some (as Delitzsch) understand this promise to teach that the present alternation of the seasons did not take place in the antediluvian world; but the language does not warrant such an inference . A great convulsion had interrupted the regular order of nature, so that there had been no seedtime nor harvest through the whole inhabited world . Here it is promised that the great natural changes shall be orderly and uniform all the days of the earth . (Hebrews) The six agricultural seasons, as known among the Hebrews and the Arabs, are here mentioned. Yet we are not to think of them as dividing up the year among themselves after the manner of our four seasons. The words rendered seedtime and harvest have reference to the sowing and the reaping of grains, while the words rendered summer and winter have reference primarily to the cutting and gathering of fruits, and more exactly correspond to our summer and autumn. Of course the times of sowing, reaping, and gathering vary according to latitude and zone. The year is also divided, with regard to temperature, into cold and heat. The promise, then, is universal for mankind, and declares that the earth’s annual changes, with regard both to productions and temperature, shall be regular and perpetual. There are included, also, in this promise, the regular alternations of light and darkness, although these were not interrupted by the flood. Man craves these changes in his present state, for they are essential to his happiness and development, but will not be so with man renewed and restored, who “needs no candle, neither light of the sun,” and John says of the New Jerusalem, “there shall be no night there.” Revelation 21:25.