Job 37:6 contains a line that sounds meteorological but that the rabbis read as cosmogonic: "For to the snow He says: Become earth." Midrash Tanchuma Buber, Bereshit 11:4 takes the verse at its word.
The heavens had their source
The midrash begins by noting that Genesis 1:1 declares, "In the beginning God created the heavens." Fine. That tells us what the heavens came from — the divine creative act. But what did the earth come from? The Torah does not say.
The rabbis hunted for an answer, and Job supplied it. "From what was the earth created? From a lump of snow, as stated: 'For to the snow He says: Become earth.'"
A snowball of a planet
The image is deceptively simple. At the moment of creation, God took a mass of snow — frozen water — and commanded it to become solid ground. Dirt, rock, mountain, seabed. All of it, originally, a single compacted snowball.
This is not poetry dressed up as science. It is a theological claim. Water, in the Jewish imagination, is primordial. Genesis 1:2 says the divine spirit hovered over the waters before anything else was formed. The earth as we know it emerged from those waters — specifically, from their frozen form.
The midrash thereby solves a scriptural puzzle. The heavens have a verb of creation. The earth has a verb of transformation. The raw material was already there, and God changed its state.
Blessed and multiplying
The teaching continues with a startling move. "So the Holy One blessed them, and they became fruitful and multiplied." The "them" refers to heavens and earth. The blessing of fruitfulness that Genesis 1:22 gives to fish and birds — "be fruitful and multiply" — is here extended backward to the cosmos itself. Heaven and earth, too, reproduce. They yield. They increase.
The citation of David
The midrash closes with Psalm 134:3: "May the Lord who made heaven and earth bless you from Zion." David's liturgical blessing traces the same arc. The God who made heaven and earth — the One who spoke the heavens into being and turned a lump of snow into the ground under our feet — is the same God who blesses worshippers from Zion.
There is a theology of continuity here. The primordial blessing that made the cosmos fruitful still flows. It reaches from creation's first moment to the Temple in <a href='/categories/midrash-aggadah.html'>Jerusalem</a> to the prayers of anyone who invokes Psalm 134.
The takeaway: the earth under your feet is a miracle of state-change. God said "become earth" to a mass of snow, and the planet followed instructions. You are walking on an obedient snowball. Treat it accordingly.