Attributed commentary excerpt
Barnes' Notes on Job 26:10
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Albert Barnes (1798–1870) · 19th-century historical commentary
Source: BibleWord.ai's local reference edition of this named work.
He hath compassed the waters with bounds - The word rendered “compassed” (חוּג chûg), means to describe a circle - to mark out with a compass; and the reference is to the form of the horizon, which appears as a circle, and which seems to be marked out with a compass. A similar idea Milton has beautifully expressed in his account of the creation: “Then staid the fervid wheels, and in his hand He took the golden compasses, prepared In God’s eternal store, to circumscribe This universe, and all created things: One foot he centered, and the other turned Round through the vast profundity obscure; And said, ‘Thus far extend thy bounds, This be thy just cirrumference, O world! ‘“ Paradise Lost, B. vii. In the passage before us, we have a statement of the ancient views of geography, and of the outer limits of the world. The earth was regarded as a circular plane, surrounded by waters, and those waters encompassed with perpetual night. This region of night - this outer limit of the world, was regarded as at the outer verge of the celestial hemisphere, and on this the concave of heaven seemed to rest. See Virgil, Geor. i. 247. Illie, ut perhibent, aut intempesta silet nox Semper, et obtenta densantur, nocte tenebrae; Aut redit a nobis Aurora, diemque redicited No maps are preserved constructed at so early an age as the time of Job; but maps have been constructed from the descriptions in Strabo, Herodotus, and others, which furnish illustrations of the prevailing views on the subject of geography in their times. The oldest geographical writer among the Romans is Mela, who lived in the reign of Claudius, and who died 54 a.d. In his work, De Situ Orbis, he gives a description of the world according to the prevailing views, and probably embodied the results of former investigations and discoveries. “We find him adopting, in its fullest extent, the belief of a circumambient ocean; and when he speaks of the high earth in this middle part of it, and describes the sea as going under and washing round it, we are led to believe, that he viewed the earth as a sort of cone, or as a high mountain raised by its elevation above the abyss of waters. Having made a vague division of the world into East, West, and North, he distributed it into five zones, two temperate, one torrid, and two frigid. Only the first two were habitable; and that on the South was inacessible to man, on account of the torrid regions intervening. According to this system, however, there was on that side another earth, inhabited by people whom he calls Antichthones, from their opposite position with respect to that part which we inhabit. The form and boundaries of the known and habitable earth are thus delineated: The Mediterranean, with its branches of the Straits, the Euxine, and the Palus Moeotis; its great tributaries, the Nile and the Tanais - these combine, in his conception, to form the grand line by which the universe is divided. The Mediterranean itself separates Europe from Africa; and these continents are bounded on the East, the former by the Tanais, the latter by the Nile; all beyond or to the East of these limits was Asia.” The following cut is probably a correct representation of his system, and gives the view of the world which prevailed in his time. The ancient Arabs supposed the earth to be encompassed with an ocean. This ocean was called the “sea of darkness;” and the Northern sea was regarded as particularly pitchy and gloomy, and was called “the sea of pitchy darkne…
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