The earth... — Better —
“Are earth and all its inhabitants dissolved?
It was I adjusted its pillars.”
(See Hannah’s song, 1 Samuel 2:8.) Though the crisis be such that all is confusion and anarchy (comp. Isaiah 24:19-20 for the figure), there is no cause for fear; there is still a Ruler in heaven, He who built up the edifice which now seems to totter to its fall. The verb rendered in the Authorised Version “bear up,” is used in Job 28:15; Isaiah 40:12 in the sense of “weighing” or “measuring;” but with the same allusion to the creative work of God. Here it plainly means, so to adjust the pillars as to make them equal to the weight they have to bear.
The “pillars” are the “mountains,” as in Job 26:11. (See Note, Psalms 24:2.) Comp. Shelley —
“Sunbeam proof, I hang like a roof,
The mountains its columns are.”