While as yet he had not made the earth, nor the fields, nor the highest part of the dust of the world.
While as yet he had not made the earth, nor the fields, nor the highest part of the dust of the world. The fields" - literally, the outside places ( chuwtsowt (H2351); cf. Job 5:10, margin), the open, broad spaces of the earth; in contrast to the previous "mountains" and "hills." The Chaldaic, Vulgate, and Syriac take it the rivers outside the dry land. The Septuagint and the Arabic, 'the uninhabited places'-literally, the outer parts or extremities of the earth; in which case "the earth," by contrast, must mean the inhabited part of the earth - "the highest part of the dust of the world." I prefer the English version, as forming a gradation, the earth, the open fields, the highest part, consisting of the dusts (so the Hebrew) of the habitable world. The dust is the friable soil on the surface of the earth; and it is rightly associated with 'the habitable world,' as the Hebrew х teebeel (H8398)] means; because it was only after that, in the course of geological changes, the superficial friable soil or dust was produced that the earth became 'the habitable world' for vegetables, animals, and man. Junius and Maurer lose this point, as also the proper meaning of the Hebrew dust, by referring the dust to the elementary material of which the earth in general was made.