Genesis 9:13

13. Do set my bow נתתי , I have set . The verb is in the perfect tense, but the perfect is often used with reference to future events in promises and assurances, where the speaker wishes to represent the event as so absolutely certain that it may be regarded as having already taken place . Especially is this the case in prophecies . Comp . Genesis 15:18; Genesis 7:16, the promises to Abraham; Jeremiah 31:33: “I will put my law in their inward parts,” (lit . , I have put .) Kimchi remarks of this usage in the prophecies: “The thing is as certain as though already performed, it having been long determined on . ” (Comp . Ges . , Hebrews Gr . , 126, 4 . ) Some (Knobel, Del . , Keil, Bush, Jac . ) understand the text as teaching that there had been no rainbow before the flood, perhaps from the lack of the atmospheric conditions which the phenomenon is now observed to follow . Others, following Maimonides and the most celebrated Jewish scholars, as well as Chrysostom, understand that a phenomenon which had existed from the beginning, was now made a sign of this covenant . They accordingly render נתן , “appoint, constitute,” as in 1 Kings 2:35. But if the rainbow were familiar to the antediluvians, in what sense could it be a token to Noah and his family that the human race should not again be destroyed by a deluge of water? This is the question that has always perplexed expositors, especially since the natural causes of the rainbow were unfolded by the discoveries of Newton. Of course there is no difficulty to the Christian expositor in assuming, with Bush and Delitzsch, that the peculiar atmospheric conditions which now precede the rainbow did not exist before the deluge, being providentially prevented, from a foresight of the moral uses to which it was hereafter to be applied. Yet assumptions of this character are obviously to be avoided. We are decidedly of the opinion that science has increased rather than diminished the lustre of this promise, and that no unwarrantable assumption or meddlesome softening away of the express statements of the text is required by modern discoveries. After the terrible deluge storm, the sun bursts through the retiring clouds, and the glorious arch appears. It is a sign that the storm is vanquished by the sun, a beautiful trophy woven by the sunbeams and water-drops on the skirts of the retreating tempest. God points it out to Noah as a symbol of peace restored after the fierce elemental war, and science now shows us how completely it is such a symbol, it being the first flashing glance of the victorious sun through the discomfited clouds as they discharge their last shower upon the air. And Jehovah says, “I have set my bow in the cloud;” “set” is the emphatic word. He has bound the bow, wherein is the essence of the promise, to the stormy heavens; that is, the bow, or in other words, by immutable laws, the causes that produce the bow, shall never fail. The sun shall always burst through the clouds. There was a storm which, to the antediluvian world, had no end; to that doomed race no bow appeared; but man hereafter shall always see the bow in the heavens. God has set, established, it there by an immutable decree. Nature is so constituted, its forces so adjusted, that another similar convulsion can never occur. Thus is the bow set in the heavens.