Bible Strands
Psalms 147:17
He casts forth His hail like pebbles. Who can withstand His icy blast?
Berean Standard Bible
Follow its threads on the canvas →
Study note
Setting — The psalmist addresses the worshiping community while tracing God’s sovereign management of creation, moving from the distribution of snow and frost to the violent arrival of winter storms.
The words — The Hebrew מַשְׁלִיךְ (mash.Likh) means “he throws,” and כְּפִתִּים (khe./fi.Tim) means “like crumbs,” literally depicting hail as small, hard fragments hurled downward.
The thread — The same theme of God’s direct control over ice and cold appears in Job 38:29, Job 38:22, and Job 37:9, where the text consistently attributes winter phenomena to divine command rather than natural cycles.
Why it lands — The rhetorical question forces the reader to recognize human powerlessness against divine action and to accept God’s absolute authority over the physical world.
Drafted by a language model from the text, its original words and its cross-references, then checked against them. It can still be wrong: open the verse in the app to report it.
The Hebrew words
King James Version
He casteth forth his ice like morsels: who can stand before his cold?
Cross-references
- Job 38:29 From whose womb does the ice emerge? Who gives birth to the frost from heaven,
- Job 38:22 Have you entered the storehouses of snow or observed the storehouses of hail,
- Job 37:9 The tempest comes from its chamber, and the cold from the driving north winds.
- Psalms 78:47 He killed their vines with hailstones and their sycamore-figs with sleet.
- Exodus 9:23 So Moses stretched out his staff toward heaven, and the LORD sent thunder and hail, and lightning struck the earth. So the LORD rained down hail upon the land of Egypt.
- Joshua 10:11 As they fled before Israel along the descent from Beth-horon to Azekah, the LORD cast down on them large hailstones from the sky, and more of them were killed by the hailstones than by the swords of the Israelites.