Do Ecclesiastes and Job describe the water cycle accurately?

Neither verse sets out to explain how water moves. Both are poetry, and each is making a different point. Ecclesiastes 1:4–7 is a short poem on endless repetition: generations come and go, the sun rises and sets, the wind goes round and round, and the rivers keep pouring into the sea, which never fills. What it says is what anyone can see, and it is true. Delitzsch (in Keil and Delitzsch) argues that the last line, in Hebrew, means that the rivers keep flowing to the same place again and again, not that they run back underground to their springs; and he notes that they can do so because the water rises from the sea as vapour and falls again as rain.

The Old Testament does know that the sea feeds the rain. Amos twice describes the Lord as he “that calleth for the waters of the sea, and poureth them out upon the face of the earth” (Amos 5:8; 9:6). Elihu says that God “maketh small the drops of water” which “the clouds do drop and distil upon man abundantly” (Job 36:27–28), and Ecclesiastes itself says, “If the clouds be full of rain, they empty themselves upon the earth” (11:3). Taken together, these give a fair everyday picture of a cycle, though none of them is a scientific account.

Job 38:22 belongs to God’s questions to Job, which show how little a man knows or controls. The Hebrew ’otsarot (H214) means stores or treasuries: snow and hail are pictured as reserves at God’s command, which he holds “against the time of trouble, against the day of battle and war” (38:23), as when hail fell on the Amorites at Beth-horon (Joshua 10:11). Gill warns against imagining heaps laid up in the sky; the point is that God brings them out when he pleases. Delitzsch (in Keil and Delitzsch) adds that the aim of the questions is moral, not scientific, and that their form is shaped by how ancient people perceived the weather.

Knowledge ahead of its time

Some Christian writers, for example at Apologetics Press, see in Ecclesiastes 1:7 and Amos 9:6 a real grasp of the full water cycle, well before it was studied in the seventeenth century. The verses fit the cycle well, but they can also be read as plain observation, and Greek thinkers such as Aristotle had already described water rising from the sea and falling as rain, so this argument should not be pressed too hard.

Water returning underground

Many older writers, Gill among them, thought that sea water ran back to the springs through hidden passages under the earth, and read Ecclesiastes 1:7 in that way. That was the science of their day. The verse itself does not say how the water returns.

Hebrew scholars differ over the last line of Ecclesiastes 1:7: whether it means that the rivers return to the place they came from, or that they go on flowing to the place they always go.