Judges, Ruth: Revised Edition (The NIV Application Commentary)

by K. Lawson Younger

This may seem to moderns a strange confusion of meteorological and astronomical phenomena, but it was perfectly understandable in ancient Near Eastern thought, where weather phenomena were part of the same celestial phenomena as lunar, solar, stellar, and planetary phenomena. Thus, in the Mesopotamian work dealing with astronomical omens, Enūma Anu Enlil, fourteen out of seventy tablets relate to the storm god Adad and include such occurrences as lightning, thunder, rainbows, cloud formations, earthquakes, and winds. This is undoubtedly because the distinction in distance between the observer and clouds, meteors, and stars was not perceived to be that different by ancient people.88 Thus, the heavenly epiphany of stars and storm are all under the authority of the LORD, who is elsewhere called in the NIV translation the LORD Almighty (lit. “the LORD of hosts” [yhwh tsaba’ot], e.g. 1 Sam 1:3; Isa 9:7).89