ḥoreph

The biblical year has two halves rather than four seasons. Summer (קַיִץ) is the hot, rainless stretch; this word is the other half, the cool months when the rains fall. Because the two together take in everything, they are used as a pair for the whole unbroken year: "seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night shall not cease" (Genesis 8:22). The psalmist says God made them both (Psalm 74:17), and Zechariah promises water flowing from Jerusalem that never fails, "in summer and in winter" alike (Zechariah 14:8).

For a farmer this is the working season, not a dead one. The first rains soften ground that summer baked hard, and plowing and sowing begin, which is why Proverbs mocks the man who will not plow then and finds nothing when the grain harvest (קָצִיר) comes (Proverbs 20:4). At the same time it is the wet, chilly season people shelter from. King Jehoiakim sits in "the winter house" in the ninth month with a fire burning in front of him (Jeremiah 36:22), and the wealthy of Amos's day keep a winter house and a summer house, both of which God says he will strike down (Amos 3:15).

Job turns the season into a picture of his own life, looking back "to the days of my autumn" (Job 29:4). He does not mean his decline. He means the ripe, strongest years, when his children were still around him and God's care covered his tent. Scholars disagree about the exact force of the phrase, and an older translation tradition rendered it "my youth" instead.