He casteth forth his ice like morsels: who can stand before his cold?
He casteth forth his ice like morsels: Who can stand before his cold?
Casting forth His ice like morsels, Before His cold who doth stand?
He casteth forth his ice like morsels: who can stand before his cold?
Psalms — The canon's longest book — 150 Psalms edited into five doxology-bookended books, composed across a millennium, attributed to David, Asaph, Korah's sons, Moses, Solomon, Heman, Ethan, and anonymous voices. A ''Torah of David''; the Bible's longest continuous liturgical-devotional corpus.
Rare words are the text's own signal of a deliberate thread — the fewer the occurrences, the more the places it appears belong together.
Voices4
He sends his crystal like morsels. As his loaves are broken and become morsels, so too this crystal is broken and turned into morsels. Crystal has this nature: it forms whenever waters are frozen — what we call ice. Between crystal and water, then, there is the same difference as between water and ice: for water is poured out, as it were, very broadly, whereas crystal is, as it were, compacted into itself, and reduced into one form. Whenever water freezes, it makes crystal.
Jerome· Homily 57, on Psalm 147, 420patristic
He casteth forth his ice like morsels,.... Divided like morsels, as the Targum; cut into pieces, like morsels of bread. This seems to have respect to hail stones, which sometimes fall like pieces of ice, and are very prejudicial to the fruits of the earth: this was one of the ten plagues of Egypt; and whereby also many of the Canaanites were destroyed in the times of Joshua, Exo 9:23; and there is an exceeding great storm of hail yet to come, very dreadful; see Rev 16:
John Gill· Exposition of the Old Testament (1748-1763)reformed
. Ver. 17. He casteth forth his ice like morsels. Such are the crumbs of hail which he casts forth, or the crusts of ice which he creates upon the waters. These morsels are his ice, and he casts them abroad. The two expressions indicate a very real presence of God in the phenomena of nature. Who can stand before his cold? None can resist the utmost rigours of cold any more than they can bear the vehemence of heat.
God's Word, as a swift messenger, executes His purpose, for with Him to command is to perform (Ge 1:3; Ps 33:9), and He brings about the wonders of providence as easily as men cast crumbs.
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown· Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible, 1871reformed
The verses this one reaches6
From whose womb does the ice emerge? Who gives birth to the frost from heaven,
Have you entered the storehouses of snow or observed the storehouses of hail,
The tempest comes from its chamber, and the cold from the driving north winds.
He killed their vines with hailstones and their sycamore-figs with sleet.
So Moses stretched out his staff toward heaven, and the LORD sent thunder and hail, and lightning struck the earth. So the LORD rained down hail upon the land of Egypt.
As they fled before Israel along the descent from Beth-horon to Azekah, the LORD cast down on them large hailstones from the sky, and more of them were killed by the hailstones than by the swords of the Israelites.
