Ice

Ice in the UPDV is wholly God's work — a phenomenon of cold whose origin Job is asked to name and whose distribution the psalmist celebrates as effortless on God's part. The few passages all sit inside a register of awe at created weather.

Job's Question

The first appearances belong to Job. In his complaint about treacherous friends he reaches for the figure of streams swollen and then frozen — they "are black by reason of the ice, [And] in which the snow hides itself" (Job 6:16). The friends, like a wadi running ice in spring and dust in summer, fail him at the moment of need.

When Yahweh answers Job from the whirlwind, ice is one of the many things Job did not make and cannot account for: "Out of whose womb came the ice? And the frost of heaven, who has given birth to it?" (Job 38:29). The question is rhetorical, but the language gives ice a birth and a maker — it comes from a womb, and it is "of heaven."

Cast Like Morsels

The Psalter takes up the same theme as praise. "He casts forth his ice like morsels: Who can stand before his cold?" (Ps 147:17). The verb is the easy gesture of throwing scraps, and the question that follows hangs the whole weather under God's authority — no one stands before his cold.

In The Catalog Of Wonders

Sirach extends the same stretch of nature poetry. "Also the hoarfrost, he pours it out like salt, And he causes flowers to bloom like sapphires" (Sir 43:19). The next verse turns explicitly to freezing water: "The cold of the north wind he causes to blow, And hardens the pond like a bottle; Upon every gathering of waters he spreads a crust, And the pond puts on, as it were, a breastplate" (Sir 43:20). The crust over the pond, the breastplate of ice, the salt-like hoarfrost — these are the close-up images the rest of the canon assumes when it asks who gave the ice its birth.