The waters here are those above the firmament, the whole of this part of the Psalm being occupied with the heavens; and there is no place left for the solid firmament, of which the writer evidently knew nothing. He represents God as laying his chambers on the waters, instead of on the supposed firmament, and as careering in cloudy chariots on the wings of the wind, instead of over a solid arch. For all the above reasons, we conclude that the "expanse" of the verses under consideration was understood by the writers of the book of God to be _aerial_, not _solid_; and the "establishment of the clouds above," as it is finely called in Proverbs, is the effect of those meteorological laws to which I have already referred, and which were now for the first time brought into operation by the divine Legislator. The Hebrew theology was not of a kind to require such expedients as that of solid heavenly arches; it recurred at once to the will--the decree--of Jehovah; and was content to believe that through this efficient cause the "rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full," for "to the place whence the rivers came, thither they return again," through the agency of those floating clouds, "the waters above the heavens," which "pour down rain according to the vapor thereof." God called the expanse "Heaven." In former chapters we have noticed that heaven in the popular speech of the Hebrews, as in our own, had different meanings, applying alike to the cloudy, the astral, and the spiritual heavens. The Creator here sanctions its application to the aerial expanse; and accordingly throughout the Scriptures it is used in this way; _rakiah_ occurs very rarely, as if it had become nearly obsolete, or was perhaps regarded as a merely technical or descriptive term. The divine sanction for the use of the term heaven for the atmosphere is, as already explained, to indicate that this popular use is not to interfere with its application to the whole universe beyond our earth in verse 1st. The poetical parts of the Bible, and especially the book of Job, which is probably the most ancient of the whole, abound in references to the atmosphere and its phenomena. I may quote a few of these passages, to enable us to understand the views of these subjects given in the Bible, and the meaning attached to the creation of the atmosphere, in very ancient periods. In Job, 38th chapter, we have the following: "In what way is the lightning distributed, And how is the east wind spread abroad over the earth? Who hath opened a channel for the pouring rain, Or a way for the thunder-flash? To cause it to rain on the land where no man is, In the desert where no one dwells; To saturate the desolate and waste ground, And to cause the bud of the tender herb to spring forth."