Who giveth rain upon the earth. To the dweller in the parched regions of South-Western Asia rain is the greatest of all blessings, and seems the greatest, of all marvels. When for months and months together the sun has blazed all day long out of a cloudless sky, when the heaven that is over his head has been brass, and the earth that is under him iron (Deuteronomy 28:33), a great despair comes upon him, and that it should ever rain again seems almost an impossibility.
Where is the rain to come from? From that cruel, glaring sky, which has pursued him with its hostility week after week, and month after month? Or from that parched earth in which, as it seems, no atom of moisture is left?
When God at length gives rain, he scarcely believes his eyes. What? The blessed moisture is once more descending from the sky, and watering the earth, and quickening what seemed dead, and turning the desert into a garden!
All Eastern poetry is full of the praises of rain, of its blessedness, of its marvellousness, and of its quickening power. Very naturally Eliphaz, in speaking of God's marvellous works of mercy, mentions rain first, as, within his experience, one of the chief.
And sendeth waters upon the fields. This is either the usual pleonastic repetition of the second hemistich, or (perhaps) a reference to the fountains and rills of water, which spring into being as a consequence of the rain.