he clouds above,
when he strengthened the fountains of the deep." The Septuagint in
this passage reads "throne on the winds" and "fountains under the
heaven."[39] Though we can not attach much value to these readings,
there seems little reason to doubt that the author of this passage
understands by the deep the atmospheric waters, and not the sea,
which he mentions separately. The same meaning must be attached to the
word in another passage of the Book of Proverbs: "The Lord in wisdom
hath founded the earth, by understanding hath he established the
heavens; by his knowledge the depths are broken up, and the clouds
drop down the small rain."

In the passage now under consideration, it would seem that we have
both the deep and the waters mentioned, and this not in a way which
would lead us to infer their identity. The darkness on the surface of
the deep and the Spirit of God on the face of the waters seem to refer
to the condition of two distinct objects at the same time. Neither can
the word here refer to subterranean cavities, for the ascription of a
surface to these, and the statement that they were enveloped in
darkness, would in this case have neither meaning nor use. For these
reasons I am induced to believe that the locality of the deep or abyss
is to be sought, not in the universal ocean or the interior of the
earth, but in the vaporous or aeriform mass mantling the surface of
our nascent planet, and containing the materials out of which the
atmosphere was afterward elaborated. This is a view leading to
important consequences: one of which is that the darkness on the
surface of the deep can not have been, as believed by the advocates of
a local chaos, a mere atmospheric obscuration; since even at the
_surface_ of what then represented the atmosphere darkness prevailed.
"God covered the earth with the deep as with a garment, and the waters
stood above the hills," and without this outer garment was the
darkness of space destitute of luminaries, at least of those greater
ones which are of primary importance to us. We learn from the
following verses that there was no layer of clear atmosphere in this
misty deep, separating the clouds from the ocean waters.

The last clause of the verse has always been obscure, and perhaps it
is still impossible to form a clear idea of the operation intended to
be described. We are not even certain whether it is intended to
represent any thing within the compass of ordinary natural l