World English Bible · Egypt and Sinai
Deuteronomy 19
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When your cuts off the nations whose land your gives you, and you succeed them and in their cities and in their houses, you shall three cities for yourselves in the middle of your land, which your gives you to possess. You shall prepare , and divide the borders of your land which your causes you to into three parts, that every man slayer may flee there. This is the case of the man slayer who shall flee there and live: Whoever kills his neighbor unintentionally, and didn't hate him in time past— as when a man goes into the forest with his neighbor to chop wood and his hand swings the ax to cut down the tree, and the head slips from the handle and hits his neighbor so that he dies—he shall flee to one of these cities and live. Otherwise, the might pursue the man slayer while hot is in and overtake him, because is long, and strike him mortally, even though he was not worthy of , because he didn't hate him in time past. 7Therefore I command you to three cities for yourselves. If your enlarges your border, as he has to your fathers, and gives you all the land which he promised to give to your fathers; and if you keep all this to do it, which I command you today, to love your , and to walk ever in his ways, then you shall add three cities more for yourselves, in addition to these three. This is so that innocent will not be shed in the middle of your land which your gives you for an , leaving on you. But if any man hates his neighbor, lies in wait for him, rises up against him, strikes him mortally so that he dies, and he flees into one of these cities; then the of his city shall send and bring him there, and him into the hand of the , that he may . Your eye shall not him, but you shall purge the innocent from Israel that it may go well with you. You shall not remove your neighbor's landmark, which they of old time have set, in your which you shall , in the land that your gives you to possess. One shall not rise up against a man for any , or for any that he . At the of two , or at the of three , shall a matter be established. If an unrighteous rises up against any man to testify against him of wrongdoing, then both the men, between whom the controversy is, shall stand before , before the priests and the judges who shall be in those days; and the judges shall make diligent inquisition; and behold, if the is a false , and has testified falsely against his brother, then you shall do to him as he had thought to do to his brother. So you shall remove the evil from among you. shall hear, and fear, and will never again commit any such evil among you. Your eyes shall not : life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.
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.