Have you entered the storehouses of the snow…? begins another question in the Hebrew with the verb entered, just as in verse 16. Snow and hail are depicted as kept by God in warehouses, stored up for the proper season or occasion. Hail particularly is used by God as a weapon in Joshua 10.11; Exodus 9.22; Isaiah 28.17; Ezekiel 13.13. Storehouses or “storerooms” may also be rendered more generally as “places where the snow is kept.”

The second line matches the first in meaning. Hail refers to small balls of ice that fall to the earth from the cold sky, usually associated with thunderstorms. Good News Translation reduces the two lines of verse 22 to “… storerooms, where I keep the snow and hail.” In translation it may be best to reduce the repetition of storehouses in the two lines to say, for example, “Have you gone to the place where I store up the snow and hail?” In tropical areas hail is often better known than snow. In some languages it may be preferable to say “cold and hail” or “dew and hail.”

Quoted with permission from Reyburn, Wiliam. A Handbook on Job. (UBS Helps for Translators). New York: UBS, 1992. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .