5:10 he gives 1 rain on the earth, 2
and sends 3 water on the fields; 4
38:26 to cause it to rain on an uninhabited land, 5
a desert where there are no human beings, 6
38:27 to satisfy a devastated and desolate land,
and to cause it to sprout with vegetation? 7
38:28 Does the rain have a father,
or who has fathered the drops of the dew?
65:9 You visit the earth and give it rain; 8
you make it rich and fertile 9
with overflowing streams full of water. 10
You provide grain for them, 11
for you prepare the earth to yield its crops. 12
65:10 You saturate 13 its furrows,
and soak 14 its plowed ground. 15
With rain showers you soften its soil, 16
and make its crops grow. 17
65:11 You crown the year with your good blessings, 18
and you leave abundance in your wake. 19
135:7 He causes the clouds to arise from the end of the earth,
makes lightning bolts accompany the rain,
and brings the wind out of his storehouses.
14:22 Do any of the worthless idols 20 of the nations cause rain to fall?
Do the skies themselves send showers?
Is it not you, O Lord our God, who does this? 21
So we put our hopes in you 22
because you alone do all this.”
1 tn Heb “who gives.” The participle continues the doxology here. But the article is necessary because of the distance between this verse and the reference to God.
2 tn In both halves of the verse the literal rendering would be “upon the face of the earth” and “upon the face of the fields.”
3 tn The second participle is simply coordinated to the first and therefore does not need the definite article repeated (see GKC 404 §126.b).
4 tn The Hebrew term חוּצוֹת (khutsot) basically means “outside,” or what is outside. It could refer to streets if what is meant is outside the house; but it refers to fields here (parallel to the more general word) because it is outside the village. See Ps 144:13 for the use of the expression for “countryside.” The LXX gives a much wider interpretation: “what is under heaven.”
5 tn Heb “on a land, no man.”
6 tn Heb “a desert, no man in it.”
7 tn Heb “to cause to sprout a source of vegetation.” The word מֹצָא (motsa’) is rendered “mine” in Job 28:1. The suggestion with the least changes is Wright’s: צָמֵא (tsame’, “thirsty”). But others choose מִצִּיָּה (mitsiyyah, “from the steppe”).
8 tn The verb form is a Polel from שׁוּק (shuq, “be abundant”), a verb which appears only here and in Joel 2:24 and 3:13, where it is used in the Hiphil stem and means “overflow.”
9 tn Heb “you greatly enrich it.”
10 tn Heb “[with] a channel of God full of water.” The divine name is probably used here in a superlative sense to depict a very deep stream (“a stream fit for God,” as it were).
11 tn The pronoun apparently refers to the people of the earth, mentioned in v. 8.
12 tn Heb “for thus [referring to the provision of rain described in the first half of the verse] you prepare it.” The third feminine singular pronominal suffix attached to the verb “prepare” refers back to the “earth,” which is a feminine noun with regard to grammatical form.
13 tn Heb “saturating” [the form is an infinitive absolute].
14 tn Heb “flatten, cause to sink.”
15 tn Heb “trenches,” or “furrows.”
16 tn Heb “soften it,” that is, the earth.
17 tn Heb “its vegetation you bless.” Divine “blessing” often involves endowing an object with special power or capacity.
18 tn Heb “your good,” which refers here to agricultural blessings.
19 tn Heb “and your paths drip with abundance.”
20 tn The word הֶבֶל (hevel), often translated “vanities”, is a common pejorative epithet for idols or false gods. See already in 8:19 and 10:8.
21 tn Heb “Is it not you, O
22 tn The rhetorical negatives are balanced by a rhetorical positive.
23 tn Grk “be sons of your Father in heaven.” Here, however, the focus is not on attaining a relationship (becoming a child of God) but rather on being the kind of person who shares the characteristics of God himself (a frequent meaning of the Semitic idiom “son of”). See L&N 58.26.
24 tn Grk “comes upon.”