King James Version · Egypt and Sinai
Deuteronomy 17
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Thou shalt not unto thy any bullock, or sheep, wherein is , or any evilfavouredness: for that is an unto thy . If there be found among you, within any of thy which thy giveth thee, man or woman, that hath wrought wickedness in the sight of thy , in transgressing his , And hath gone and other gods, and them, either the sun, or moon, or any of , which I have not commanded; And it be told thee, and thou hast heard of it, and enquired diligently, and, behold, it be true, and the thing certain, that such is wrought in Israel: Then shalt thou bring forth that man or that woman, which have committed that thing, unto thy , even that man or that woman, and shalt stone them with stones, till they . At the of two , or three , shall he that is worthy of be put to ; but at the of one he shall not be put to . The hands of the shall be first upon him to put him to , and afterward the hands of all the people. So thou shalt put the evil away from among you. If there arise a matter too hard for thee in , between and , between plea and plea, and between stroke and stroke, being matters of controversy within thy : then shalt thou arise, and get thee up into the place which thy shall choose; And thou shalt come unto the priests the , and unto the judge that shall be in those days, and enquire; and they shall shew thee the sentence of : And thou shalt do according to the sentence, which they of that place which shall choose shall shew thee; and thou shalt observe to do according to all that they inform thee: According to the sentence of which they shall teach thee, and according to the which they shall tell thee, thou shalt do: thou shalt not decline from the sentence which they shall shew thee, to , nor to the left. And the man that will do presumptuously, and will not unto the priest that standeth to minister there before thy , or unto the judge, even that man shall : and thou shalt the evil from Israel. And all the people shall hear, and fear, and do no more presumptuously. When thou art come unto the land which thy giveth thee, and shalt possess it, and shalt therein, and shalt say, I will set a king over me, like as all the nations that are about me; Thou shalt in any set him king over thee, whom thy shall choose: one from among thy brethren shalt thou set king over thee: thou mayest not set a over thee, which is not thy brother. But he shall not multiply horses to himself, nor cause the people to return to , to the end that he should multiply horses: forasmuch as hath said unto you, Ye shall henceforth return no more that way. Neither shall he multiply wives to himself, that turn not away: neither shall he greatly multiply to himself silver and gold. And it shall be, when he sitteth upon of , that he shall write him a copy of this law in a book out of that which is before the priests the : And it shall be with him, and he shall read therein all the days of his life: that he may learn to his , to keep all the words of this law and these , to do them: That be not lifted up above his brethren, and that he turn not aside from the , to , or to the left: to the end that he may prolong his days in , he, and his children, in the midst of Israel.
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.