World English Bible · Egypt and Sinai
Deuteronomy 25
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If there is a controversy between men, and they come to and the judges judge them, then they shall and condemn . It shall be, if man is worthy to be beaten, that the judge shall cause him to lie down and to be beaten before , according to his wickedness, by number. He may sentence him to no more than forty stripes. He shall not give more, lest if he should give more and beat him more than that many stripes, then your brother will be degraded in your sight. You shall not muzzle the ox when he treads out the grain. If brothers together, and one of them dies and has no son, the wife of shall not be married outside to a . Her husband's brother shall go in to her, and take her as his wife, and perform the duty of a husband's brother to her. It shall be that whom she bears shall succeed in the name of his brother who is , that his name not be blotted out of Israel. If the man doesn't want to take his brother's wife, then his brother's wife shall go up to the to the , and say, "My husband's brother refuses to raise up to his brother a name in Israel. He will not perform the duty of a husband's brother to me." Then the of his city shall call him, and speak to him. If he stands and says, "I don't want to take her," then his brother's wife shall come to him in the of the , and loose his from off his foot, and spit in . She shall answer and say, "So shall it be done to the man who does not build up his brother's house." 10His name shall be called in Israel, "The house of him who had his removed." 11When men strive against each other, and the wife of one draws near to her husband out of the hand of him who strikes him, and puts out her hand, and grabs him by his private parts, then you shall her hand. Your eye shall have no . You shall not have in your bag diverse weights, one heavy and one . 14You shall not have in your house diverse measures, one large and one small. You shall have a perfect and weight. You shall have a perfect and measure, that your days may be long in the land which your gives you. For all who do such things, all who do unrighteously, are an to your . Remember what did to you by as you came out of , how he met you by , and struck the rearmost of you, all who were feeble behind you, when you were faint and weary; and he didn't . Therefore it shall be, when your has given you rest from all your all around, in the land which your gives you for an to possess it, that you shall blot out the memory of from under . You shall not forget.
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.