King James Version · Egypt and Sinai
Deuteronomy 14
Touch any underlined name to see who or where it is. Tap a verse number to see where it is taken up elsewhere.
Ye are the children of your : ye shall not cut yourselves, nor make any baldness between your eyes for . For thou art an people unto thy , and hath chosen thee to be a peculiar people unto himself, above all the nations that are upon the earth. Thou shalt not eat any thing. These are the which ye shall eat: the ox, the sheep, and the goat, 5The hart, and the roebuck, and the fallow deer, and the wild goat, and the pygarg, and the wild ox, and the chamois. And every beast that parteth the hoof, and cleaveth the cleft into two claws, and cheweth the cud among the , that ye shall eat. Nevertheless these ye shall not eat of them that chew the cud, or of them that divide the cloven hoof; as the camel, and the hare, and the coney: for they chew the cud, but divide not the hoof; therefore they are unto you. And the swine, because it divideth the hoof, yet cheweth not the cud, it is unto you: ye shall not eat of their , nor touch their carcase. These ye shall eat of all that are in the waters: all that have fins and scales shall ye eat: 10And whatsoever hath not fins and scales ye may not eat; it is unto you. 11Of all clean birds ye shall eat. But these are they of which ye shall not eat: the eagle, and the ossifrage, and the ospray, 13And the glede, and the kite, and the vulture after his kind, 14And every raven after his kind, And the owl, and the night hawk, and the cuckow, and the hawk after his kind, 16The little owl, and the great owl, and the swan, 17And the pelican, and the gier eagle, and the cormorant, 18And the stork, and the heron after her kind, and the lapwing, and the bat. And every creeping thing that flieth is unto you: they shall not be eaten. 20But of all clean fowls ye may eat. Ye shall not eat of any thing that dieth of itself: thou shalt give it unto the that is in thy , that he may eat it; or thou mayest sell it unto an alien: for thou art an people unto thy . Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother’s milk. Thou shalt truly all the increase of thy , that the field bringeth forth year by year. And thou shalt eat before thy , in the place which he shall choose to place his name there, the of thy corn, of thy , and of thine oil, and the firstlings of thy herds and of thy flocks; that thou mayest learn to thy always. And if be too long for thee, so that thou art not able to carry it; or if the place be too far from thee, which thy shall choose to set his name there, when thy hath thee: 25Then shalt thou turn it into money, and bind up the money in thine hand, and shalt go unto the place which thy shall choose: And thou shalt bestow that money for whatsoever thy lusteth after, for oxen, or for sheep, or for , or for , or for whatsoever thy desireth: and thou shalt eat there before thy , and thou shalt rejoice, thou, and thine household, And the that is within thy ; thou shalt not forsake him; for he hath no part nor with thee. At the end of three years thou shalt bring forth all the of thine increase the same year, and shalt lay it up within thy : And the , (because he hath no part nor with thee,) and the , and , and the , which are within thy , shall come, and shall eat and be satisfied; that thy may thee in all the work of thine hand which thou doest.
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.