King James Version · Egypt and Sinai
Deuteronomy 25
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If there be a controversy between men, and they come unto , that the judges may judge them; then they shall , and condemn . And it shall be, if man be worthy to be beaten, that the judge shall cause him to lie down, and to be beaten before , according to his fault, by a certain number. Forty stripes he may give him, and not exceed: lest, if he should exceed, and beat him above these with many stripes, then thy brother should seem vile unto thee. Thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he treadeth out the corn. If brethren together, and one of them , and have no child, the wife of shall not marry without unto a : her husband’s brother shall go in unto her, and take her to him to wife, and perform the duty of an husband’s brother unto her. And it shall be, that which she beareth shall succeed in the name of his brother which is , that his name be not put out of Israel. And if the man like not to take his brother’s wife, then let his brother’s wife go up to the unto the , and say, My husband’s brother refuseth to raise up unto his brother a name in Israel, he will not perform the duty of my husband’s brother. Then the of his city shall call him, and speak unto him: and if he stand to it, and say, I like not to take her; Then shall his brother’s wife come unto him in the of the , and loose his shoe from off his foot, and spit in , and shall answer and say, So shall it be done unto that man that will not build up his brother’s house. 10And his name shall be called in Israel, The house of him that hath his shoe loosed. 11When men strive together one with another, and the wife of the one draweth near for to her husband out of the hand of him that smiteth him, and putteth forth her hand, and taketh him by the secrets: Then thou shalt her hand, thine eye shall not her. Thou shalt not have in thy bag divers weights, a great and a small. 14Thou shalt not have in thine house divers measures, a great and a small. But thou shalt have a perfect and weight, a perfect and measure shalt thou have: that thy days may be lengthened in the land which thy giveth thee. For all that do such things, and all that do unrighteously, are an unto thy . Remember what did unto thee by , when ye were come forth out of ; How he met thee by , and smote the hindmost of thee, even all that were feeble behind thee, when thou wast faint and weary; and he feared not . Therefore it shall be, when thy hath given thee rest from all thine round about, in the land which thy giveth thee for an to possess it, that thou shalt blot out the remembrance of from under ; thou shalt not forget it.
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.