Deuteronomy 11:14

that I will give the rain of your land The Heb. text is evidently due to the same hand which inserted Deuteronomy 11:13, for it immediately follows that verse, and as evidently the original reading is that of Sam., LXX and Vulg. that he will give the rain to thy land, which connects with Deuteronomy 11:12.

in its season, etc.] The agricultural year in Palestine consisted of two seasons, a rainy and a dry. -Towards the end of October heavy rains begin to fall, at intervals, for a day or several days at a time. These are what the English Bible calls the earlyor formerrain, Heb. yôreh, the pourer. It opens the agricultural year; the soil, hardened and cracked by the long summer, rainless since May, is loosened, and the farmer begins ploughing. Till the end of November the average rainfall is not large, but it increases through December, January and February, begins to abate in March, and is practically over by the end of April. The latter rains, Heb. malḳosh, from a root meaning to be late, are the heavy showers of March and April. Coming as they do when the grain is ripening, and being the last before the long summer drought, they are of far more importance to the country than all the rains of the winter months, and that is why these are so frequently passed over in Scripture, and emphasis is laid only on the early and latter rains 1 [129] " (HGHL, pp. 63, 64). The annual rainfall is considerable: at Jerusalem it averages over 25 inches, about the same as the annual rainfall in London. Whether it was more copious in ancient times is a question much debated. For this and other details see the present writer's Jerusalem, i. 19, 77 f. The growth of the vine and olive depend, like the ripening of the corn, essentially on the latter rain; and the olive requires the rainless summer for the ripening of its berries (op. cit.300).

[129] This has given people the idea that there are only two periods of rain in the Syrian year, at the vernal and the autumnal equinoxes; but the whole of the winter is the rainy season, as indeed we are told in the parallel lines of the Song of Songs: Lo the winter is past, the rain is over and gone(Deuteronomy 2:11).