King James Version · Egypt and Sinai
Deuteronomy 13
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If there arise among you a , or a dreamer of , and giveth thee a sign or a wonder, And the sign or the wonder come to pass, whereof he spake unto thee, saying, Let us go after other gods, which thou hast not known, and let us them; Thou shalt not unto the words of that , or that dreamer of : for your proveth you, to know whether ye love your with all and with all your . Ye shall walk after your , and fear him, and keep his , and his voice, and ye shall him, and cleave unto him. And that , or that dreamer of , shall be put to ; because he hath spoken to turn you away from your , which brought you out of the land of , and you out of the house of bondage, to thrust thee out of which thy commanded thee to walk in. So shalt thou put the evil away from the midst of thee. If thy brother, the son of thy mother, or thy son, or thy daughter, or the wife of thy , or thy friend, which is as thine own , entice thee secretly, saying, Let us go and other gods, which thou hast not known, thou, nor thy fathers; 7Namely, of the gods of the people which are round about you, nigh unto thee, or far off from thee, from the one end of the earth even unto the other end of the earth; Thou shalt not consent unto him, nor unto him; neither shall thine eye him, neither shalt thou spare, neither shalt thou conceal him: But thou shalt surely kill him; thine hand shall be first upon him to put him to , and afterwards the hand of all the people. And thou shalt stone him with stones, that he ; because he hath sought to thrust thee away from thy , which brought thee out of the land of , from the house of bondage. And all Israel shall hear, and fear, and shall do no more any such wickedness as this is among you. If thou shalt hear say in one of thy cities, which thy hath given thee to there, saying, Certain men, the children of Belial, are gone out from among you, and have withdrawn the inhabitants of their city, saying, Let us go and other gods, which ye have not known; Then shalt thou enquire, and make search, and ask diligently; and, behold, if it be truth, and the thing certain, that such is wrought among you; Thou shalt surely smite the inhabitants of that city with the edge of , destroying it utterly, and all that is therein, and the cattle thereof, with the edge of . And thou shalt gather all the spoil of it into the midst of the street thereof, and shalt burn with the city, and all the spoil thereof every whit, for thy : and it shall be an heap for ever; it shall not be built again. And there shall cleave nought of the thing to thine hand: that may turn from the fierceness of his , and shew thee mercy, and have upon thee, and multiply thee, as he hath unto thy fathers; When thou shalt to thy , to keep all his which I command thee this day, to do that which is right in the eyes of thy .
The 1611 translation, public domain. Its original printing included the Apocrypha, which is why the deuterocanonical books can be read here. Notes and cards are EKLI’s own.
The world at this moment · Egypt and Sinai, 1450 BC to 1200 BC ›
Israel in and then out of Egypt, at a period when Egypt was an imperial power that also controlled Canaan. The nation is formed as a people with a law before it has any land.
- Egypt
- The New Kingdom at its imperial peak, with a professional army, a chariot corps, and control reaching up through Canaan. Ramesses II reigns for sixty-six years and covers the country in monuments to himself. Egyptian power in this period is the reason Canaan is garrisoned rather than free.
- The Hittites
- The other superpower, in what is now Turkey, and Egypt's rival for the Levant. The two fight the largest chariot battle of the ancient world at Kadesh, then sign a treaty whose text survives from both sides. Hittite treaty form, with its historical prologue, stipulations, witnesses, blessings, and curses, is the shape the Sinai covenant takes, which is one of the stronger arguments for the antiquity of that material.
- The Aegean
- Mycenaean Greece: warrior kings in stone citadels at Mycenae and Pylos, keeping palace accounts in Linear B. The world of the Trojan War stories, whatever lies behind them.
- Further afield
- The Shang dynasty in China is casting extraordinary bronzes and writing questions to its ancestors on ox bones. In Mesoamerica the Olmec are beginning the first civilisation of the Americas.