Job 14:9 [Yet] through the scent of water it will bud, and bring forth boughs like a plant.
Ver. 9. Yet through the scent of water it will bud] Heb. From the smell of waters. A sweet metaphor, saith Merlin, sense being attributed to things senseless, as smelling to the fire, Judges 16:9, and here to trees, which are said to turn themselves and their roots after a sort, to take in the smell of the water, and thereby refreshed to bud and bring forth boughs, like a plant. This is check to those that live under the droppings of the ordinances, and yet are like the cypress tree, which, the more it is watered, proves the less fruitful, and being once cut down, it never springs again; whence the Romans, who did not believe in a resurrection, were wont to place a cypress tree at the threshold of the house of death, as Pliny and Servius tell us. (Serv. in Virg. 1. 4; Plin. lib. 16, cap. 32.)