Job37chapter 37

This chapter is a weather description from inside the weather. Elihu's own heart trembles and is moved out of its place; hear attentively the noise of his voice, and the sound that goes out of his mouth. Thunder as the voice of God is how the ancient world heard it, and Elihu says the lightning goes to the ends of the earth and God thunders marvellously with a voice we cannot comprehend.

Then he runs through the seasons as commands. God says to the snow, be thou on the earth, and to the small rain and the great rain of his strength. He seals up the hand of every man, so that all men may know his work — winter storms stopped outdoor labour, and everyone in an agricultural society understood being shut indoors by the weather. The beasts go into their dens and remain in their places.

The winds come next, and the directions are exact for that region. The whirlwind comes out of the south and the cold out of the north; by the breath of God frost is given, and the breadth of the waters is frozen. When the south wind quiets the earth, the heat becomes unbearable and a man's garments are warm on him.

His last image is the sky itself: hast thou with him spread out the sky, which is strong, and as a molten mirror? Mirrors in that world were sheets of polished bronze, cast and burnished — hard, bright, and blinding in sunlight. A white, hazy, glaring sky after a storm looks exactly like that, and every hearer had squinted at one. Elihu ends by saying men cannot look on the bright light in the clouds, that with God is terrible majesty, and that he will not afflict — and then his voice stops.