unnecessary. Pareau has correctly interpreted: ad lucis usque tenebrarumque confinia; עם in the local sense, not aeque ac, although it might also have this meaning, as e.g., Ecc 2:16. The idea is, that God has appointed a fixed limit to the waters, as far as to the point at which they wash the terra firma of the extreme horizon, and where the boundary line of the realms of light and darkness is; and the basis of the expression, as Bouillier, by reference to Virgil's Georg. i. 240f., has shown, is the conception of the ancients, that the earth is surrounded by the ocean, on the other side of which the region of darkness begins.
Verses 11-13
Job 26:11-13 11 The pillars of heaven tremble
And are astonished at His threatening. 12 By His power He rouseth up the sea,
And by His understanding He breaketh Rahab in pieces. 13 By His breath the heavens become cheerful;
His hand hath formed the fugitive dragon.
The mountains towering up to the sky, which seem to support the vault of the sky, are called poetically “the pillars of heaven.” ירופפוּ is Pulal, like יחוללוּ, Job 26:5; the signification of violent and quick motion backwards and forwards is secured to the verb רוּף by the Targ. אתרופף = התפּלּץ, Job 9:6, and the Talm. רפרף of churned milk, blinding eyes (comp. הרף עין, the twinkling of the eye, and Arab. rff, fut. i. o. nictare), flapping wings (comp. Arab. rff and rfrf, movere, motitare alas), of wavering thinking. גּערה is the divine command which looses or binds the powers of nature; the astonishment of the supports of heaven is, according to the radical signification of תּמהּ (cogn. שׁמם), to be conceived of as a torpidity which follows the divine impulse, without offering any resistance whatever. That רגע, Job 26:12, is to be understood transitively, not like Job 7:5, intransitively, is proved by the
