Weather and witchcraft

Use in the book

The immediate foundation is the scriptural account of rain and storms. Genesis 2 says the Lord had not yet caused rain; Job 38 presents snow, hail, downpour, lightning, and thunder as subject to divine allotment; Psalms 18 and 148 describe vapour, fire, and storm winds fulfilling God’s Word. The narrator argues that no particular subordinate creative command gives nature independent rule over these events. This is the premise from which he denies demonic weather-making.

He then rejects a specific interpretation of Christ’s storm at sea. Matthew 8, he says, simply reports the storm arising and Christ rebuking wind and sea. It does not identify the Devil as the storm’s maker. Assigning that cause adds something the narrative does not say. The argument is therefore also a rule of reading: a claim about an agent must be supported, not merely attached to a dramatic event.

The anticipated objection combines Job 1 with Paul’s references to a prince ruling in the air and the darkness of the world. The narrator refuses the inference from a title of rule in the air to the power to create wind. Such a conclusion does not follow. The same distinction between association and efficient cause appears elsewhere in the book’s account of lunar concordance and tides.

Job requires a more elaborate reinterpretation. The phrase “fire of God” is explained through the author’s claim that Hebrew uses God’s name for an exceedingly great thing. The fire and wind are consequently taken as the forms in which the Devil and his host act, rather than true fire and wind of the kind God or his angels produce. This preserves the reality of the narrative’s destruction while excluding the causal power the author denies.¹⁴⁰

The following paragraph marks another limit. The narrator does not wish to deprive elements of the motions and operations they possess through God’s universal Word, or stars of their influence and concordance. His denial of witchcraft power is not a denial of all differentiated processes within creation. It must be read within his distinction between universal created powers and those events whose government God reserves to himself.

Places to read

1. Part II · II.094.2; II.099.1; II.100.123The scriptural basis for God’s government over storms and rain.
2. Part II · II.100.2The explicit rejection of weather power attributed to the Devil and witches.
3. Part II · II.101.1; II.101.2; II.102.123The Job and Pauline objections and the distinction between appearance and true weather.
4. Part II · II.103.1The qualification preserving elemental operations and stellar concordance.

Translation

Witterung is “weather” or “weather conditions.” Unholden und Hexen is kept as “sorcerers and witches,” marking the historical categories that the text itself names.

“In the form of” translates the repeated Gestalt language in the Job interpretation. Calling these appearances mere illusions would go too far: the passage still attributes destructive acts to the Devil and his host.

Connections

Comets, Earthquakes, and Thunder and lightning develop neighbouring applications of the same causal commitments. They show that this chapter is a sustained reconsideration of phenomena under divine government, not an isolated comment about witchcraft.

The episode also belongs with Truth and falsehood and Definition and demonstration. An alleged cause cannot be accepted simply because it is rhetorically associated with an event or a scriptural phrase. The narrator repeatedly demands a valid connection between premise and conclusion.

Cautions

The argument does not warrant a claim about the author’s position on every witchcraft accusation, judicial procedure, or demonic act.

The Hebrew grammatical explanation is the author’s asserted reading strategy. The lexicon does not adopt it as a general rule of modern Hebrew grammar.

Witterung

Witterung — Attested wording in the cited original passage. II.100.2.

Unholden und Hexen

Unholden und Hexen — Attested wording in the cited original passage. II.100.2.

Wunderwercke Gottes

Wunderwercke Gottes — Attested wording in the cited original passage. II.102.1.