The waters are hid as [with] a stone,.... The surface of the waters by frost become as hard as a stone, and will bear great burdens, and admit of carriages to pass over them where ships went before; so that the waters under them are hid and quite out of sight: an emblem of the hard heart of man, which can only be thawed by the power and grace of God, by the south wind of the Spirit blowing, and the "sun of righteousness" rising on it;and the face of the deep is frozen; or bound together by the frost, as the Targum; it is taken, laid hold on, and kept together, as the word signifies, so that it cannot flow.
Historians speak of seas being frozen up, as some parts of the Scythian sea, reported by Mela , and the Cimmerian Bosphorus, by Herodotus , and the northern seas by Olaus Magnus ; as that men might travel over them on foot or on horseback, from one country to another; and Strabo relates , that where a sea fight has been in the summer time, armies and hosts have met and fought in the winter.
In Muscovy the ice is to six and ten feet deep ; in the year 401 the Euxine sea was frozen over for the space of twenty days; and in the year 763 the seas at Constantinople were frozen one hundred miles from the shore, so thick as to bear the heaviest carriages .
"Nunc hospita plaustris", &c. Virg. Georgic. l. 3. v. 362. De Situ Orbis, l. 3. c. 5. Melpomene, sive, l. 4. c. 20. Vid. Macrob. Saturnal. l. 7. c. 12. De Ritu Gent. Septent. l. 1. c. 13. Geograph. l.
7. p. 211. Vid. Alex. ab Alex. Genial. Dier. l. 1. c. 22. Scheuchzer. Phys. Sacr. vol 4. p. 810. Universal History, vol. 16. p. 489. Universal History, vol. 17. p.