World English Bible · Egypt and Sinai
Deuteronomy 17
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You shall not to your an ox or a sheep in which is or anything evil; for that is an to your . If there is found among you, within any of your which your gives you, a man or woman who does that which is evil in your sight in transgressing his , and has gone and other gods and them, or the sun, or the moon, or any of the stars of , which I have not commanded, and you are told, and you have heard of it, then you shall inquire diligently. Behold, if it is true, and the thing certain, that such is done in Israel, then you shall bring out that man or that woman who has done this evil thing to your , even that same man or woman; and you shall stone them to with stones. At the of two , or three , he who is to shall be put to . At the of one he shall not be put to . The hands of the shall be first on him to put him to , and afterward the hands of all the people. So you shall remove the evil from among you. If there arises a matter too hard for you in , between and , between plea and plea, and between stroke and stroke, being matters of controversy within your , then you shall arise, and go up to the place which your chooses. You shall come to the priests who are and to the judge who shall be in those days. You shall inquire, and they shall give you the verdict. You shall do according to the decisions of the verdict which they shall give you from that place which chooses. You shall observe to do according to all that they shall teach you. According to the decisions of which they shall teach you, and according to the which they shall tell you, you shall do. You shall not turn away from the sentence which they announce to you, to , nor to the left. The man who does presumptuously in not listening to the priest who stands to minister there before your , or to the judge, even that man shall . You shall the evil from Israel. All the people shall hear and fear, and do no more presumptuously. When you have come to the land which your gives you, and possess it and in it, and say, "I will set a king over me, like all the nations that are around me," you shall surely set him whom your chooses as king over yourselves. You shall set as king over you one from among your brothers. You may not put a over you, who is not your brother. Only he shall not multiply horses to himself, nor cause the people to return to , to the end that he may multiply horses; because has said to you, "You shall not go back that way again." He shall not multiply wives to himself, that not turn away. He shall not greatly multiply to himself silver and gold. It shall be, when he sits on of , that he shall write himself a copy of this law in a book, out of that which is before the priests. It shall be with him, and he shall read from it 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 not be lifted up above his brothers, and that he not turn away from the to , or to the left, to the end that he may prolong his days in , he and his children, in the middle of Israel.
A public domain modern English translation, free to read and share. 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.