the bowels of the earth being the storehouses where God first laid up the deep waters, Ps 33:7; and when the chaos, the misshapen earth, was like a woman big with child;when it brake forth out of the abyss, as the Targum, with force and violence, as Pharez broke out of his mother's womb; for which reason he had his name given, which signifies a breach, Ge 38:29; so it follows,[as if] it had issued out of the womb; as a child out of its mother's womb; so the sea burst forth and issued out of the bowels of the earth, and covered it all around, as in Ps 104:6; and now it was that the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters, before they were drained off the earth; this was the first open visible production of the sea, and nay be called the birth of it; see Ge 1:2.
Something like this the Heathen philosopher Archelaus had a notion of, who says , the sea was shut up in hollow places, and was as it were strained through the earth. Laert. Vit. Philosoph. l. 2. p.