09/22/2023
The Bible and the Water Cycle
The Scriptures inform us, “All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full; to the place from which the rivers come, there they return again” (Ecclesiastes 1:7). This statement alone may not seem profound. But, when considered with other biblical passages, it becomes all the more remarkable. For example, the Mississippi River dumps approximately 518 billion gallons of water every 24 hours into the Gulf of Mexico. Where does all that water go? And that’s just one of thousands of rivers. The answer lies in the hydrologic cycle, so well brought out in the Bible. Psalm 135:7 tells us, “He causes the vapors to ascend from the ends of the earth; He makes lightning for the rain.” Ecclesiastes 11:3 states that “if the clouds are full of rain, they empty themselves upon the earth.” Look at the Bible’s concise words in Amos 9:6: “He ... calls for the waters of the sea, and pours them out on the face of the earth.” The idea of a complete water cycle was not fully understood by science until the seventeenth century. However, more than two thousand years prior to the discoveries of Pierre Perrault, Edme Mariotte, Edmund Halley, and others, the Scriptures clearly spoke of a water cycle.
