And in chapter xxxvi, (verses 15, 16, Douay,) we see that Job was shut up in something like a cavern:
"15. He shall deliver the poor out of his distress, and shall open his ear in affliction.
"16. Therefore he shall set thee at large out of the narrow mouth, and which hath no foundation under it; and the rest of thy table shall be full of fatness."
That is to say, in the day when he delivers the poor out of their misery, he will bring thee forth from the place where thou hast been "hiding," (see chap. xiii, 20,) from that narrow-mouthed, bottomless cavern; and instead of starving, as you have been, your table, during the rest of your life, "shall be full of fatness."
"27. He" (God) "lifteth up the drops of rain and poureth out showers like floods.
"28. Which flow from the clouds which cover all from above."
The commentators tell us that this expression, "which cover all from above," means literally, "the bottom of the sea is laid bare"; and they confess their inability to understand it. But is it not the same story told by Ovid of the bottom of the Mediterranean having been rendered
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a bed of dry sand by Phaëton's conflagration; and does it not remind us of the Central American legend of the starving people migrating in search of the sun, through rocky places where the sea had been separated to allow them to pass?
And the King James version continues