Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 165:657 (Jan 2008)
Article: The Imagery of Clouds in the Scriptures
Author: Richard D. Patterson

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BSac 165:657 (January-March 2008) p. 13

The Imagery of Clouds in the Scriptures

Richard D. Patterson

Richard D. Patterson is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Semitics and Old Testament, Liberty University, Lynchburg, Virginia.

Since ancient times people have been fascinated with clouds. “In all times and places mythical imagination has been occupied with the shapes of clouds.”1 Clouds have been the subject of much poetic expression. For example Robert Frost describes the approach of a strong Pacific storm as follows: “The clouds were low and heavy in the skies, like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes.”2 Frost’s simile depicts an ominous mass of dark cumulonimbus clouds, which heralded the onset of savage winds bringing huge waves ashore.

Figurative Uses Of Clouds In The Ancient World

Clouds were also used figuratively in the literature of ancient times. Thus in the Ugaritic epics the storm god Baal was called “The Rider on the Clouds.” In the goddess Anat’s gory battle with her enemies, “The Virgin Anat washed her hands, the Mistress of the Peoples her fingers. . . . She drew water and washed, the heavens’ dew, the earth’s oil, the rain of the Rider on the Clouds.”3 This epithet graphically depicts the storm god Baal soaring above the

BSac 165:657 (January-March 2008) p. 14

skies riding on the clouds, his chariot. A similar epithet has been noted with regard to the Mesopotamian storm god Adad.4

Among the ancient Greeks clouds served as chariots for the gods or as tents in which the gods could conceal themselves.5 Aristophanes, the father of Greek comedy, however, found a new use for the clouds. In his classic comedy “The Clouds” he employed the image of clouds as new gods in an effort to attack the philosophers of his day—in particular Socrates. The clouds were the new gods of sophistry, which by sheer legal argumentation sought to gain its own ends in any possible way. “The Clouds of Aristophanes satirized the foibles of the fashionable sophistic school of philosophy then making itself strongly felt in the city.”6

Who are these that recite with such grandeur and might?
Are they glorified mortals of old?
Socrates: No mortals are there, but Clouds of the air,
great Gods who the indolent fill:
These grant us discourse, and logical force,
and the art of persua...

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