Job 38:37

37. Number the clouds A metaphor taken from a military enrolment same word as in 2 Samuel 24:10.

Who can stay the bottles of heaven Rather, the bottles of heaven, who inclines them? as in the margin, with the meaning, “As water is poured from a bottle when inclined, so when the clouds are full of rain they empty themselves upon the earth.”

Ecclesiastes 11:3. Sir J. Herschel’s explanation of the formation and descent of rain is as good, perhaps, as any yet proposed. “In whatever part of a cloud the original ascensional movement of the vapour ceases, the elementary globules of which it consists being abandoned to the action of gravity, begin to fall. By the theory of the resistance of fluids, the velocity of descent in air of a given density is as the square root of the diameter of the globule. The larger globules, therefore, fall fastest, and if (as must happen) they overtake the slower ones they incorporate, and, the diameter being thereby increased, the descent becomes more rapid, and the encounters more frequent, till at length the globule emerges from the lower surface of the cloud at the ‘ vapour plain,’ as a drop of rain; the size of the drops depending on the thickness of the cloud stratum and its density.” Meteorology, s.v.

Bottles of heaven “This phrase,” says Dr. Good, “is a direct Arabism for the clouds, and is to be found in every poet.” Among the citations Schultens makes from the Arabic poets is the following translation:

A broad, deep cloud, that fed the rest, was nigh,

And burst its bottle ‘ mid the warring sky.

A figure of the south wind adorns the Temple of Winds at Athens, holding a kind of pitcher (a swelling urceus) in his bared arms, as if it would deluge the earth. (See Wordsworth’s Athens and Attica, p. 153.) Scott observes that this image is similar to the inclined urn which the heathen poets place in the hand of a river god; the urn represents the fountain from which the river flows, and what fountains are to rivers the clouds are to rain. Dr. Hutchinson thinks that there is an allusion to the working of a Persian wheel, “the pitchers or bottles of which, as they come up, lie down or along, and so discharge their contents. As this discharge can only take place at a particular moment, and in consequence of the proper working of the wheel, so the discharge from the clouds can only take place at the proper moment, when allowed by the Creator.”