An exposition with practical observations continued upon the thirty-eighth, thirty-ninth, fortieth, forty-first, and forty-second,…

The Sea is a great Convention or Assembly of Waters, as Moses spake (Gen. 1.10.) The gathering together of waters, the Lord called Sea: The Sea is a confluence, or meeting of waters. There may be a great water, yet that not the Sea; the confluence of all or many waters together, that is Sea. The waters being thus gathered or assembled by the Lords Summons or Command, he hedged them in, or shut them up.

Secondly, Others render, Who anointed the doors of the Sea, ¹when it brake forth, as if it had issued out of the womb. They who give this Translation, derive the word from a root, which signifies to anoint. Some Interpreters insist much upon this sense of the word, and I find one who asserts it as the only sense of it in this place; Who anointed the doors of the Sea, that is, the passages by which the Sea issued forth. And (saith he) the reason why other learned Interpreters pitch upon that Translation of shutting up the Sea with doors, is because they knew not what to make of anointing the doors of the Sea, nor to what practice such an expression should allude, that the doors of the Sea were anointed: whereas indeed that notion of the Word bea•s the fairest allusion and proportion to the Metaphor of Child-bearing, begun in this, and carried on (as it were) professedly in the next verse, under which the Spirit of God is pleased to express the coming forth, and original of the Sea: Now, saith my Author,² it is a thing commonly known both to Physicians and Mid-wives, that those parts of the body by which the Infant comes into the world, u•e to be anointed, for its more easy passage: Thus saith God to Job, Didst thou anoint the doers of the Sea, when it brake forth, ⟨p. 96⟩as if it had issued out of the womb. It was my Mid-wisery, my wisdom and skill, not thine, that brought the Sea into the World, and gave it an easy birth, or delivered the Earth of it without hard labour. This makes the sense of the whole Context run more clearly than our reading of it. And so we have Sea-doors of two sorts in this Context: In this eighth verse, the doors of the Sea are the doors by which the Sea came forth; and in the tenth verse, we have the doors by which the Sea is kept in; whereas according to our rendering, the doors in both places are interpreted as keeping the Sea in; and so there would be a mention of the same doors twice; which though it may be admitted, yet this latter seems to be the clearest, as taking the first doors for those by which the Sea was let out, or had its birth, and the latter, for those doors by which the Sea is kept within its bounds. Who shut up the Sea with doors, When it brake forth.