King James Version · Egypt and Sinai
Deuteronomy 29
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These are the words of , which commanded to make with the in the land of , beside which he made with them in . And called unto all Israel, and said unto them, Ye have seen all that did before your eyes in the land of unto , and unto all his servants, and unto all his land; The great temptations which thine eyes have seen, the signs, and those great miracles: Yet hath not given you an to perceive, and eyes to see, and ears to hear, unto this day. And I have led you forty years in : your clothes are not waxen old upon you, and thy shoe is not waxen old upon thy foot. Ye have not eaten bread, neither have ye drunk or : that ye might know that I am your . And when ye came unto this place, the king of , and the king of , came out against us unto battle, and we smote them: And we took their land, and gave it for an unto the , and to the , and to the half tribe of . Keep therefore the words of this , and do them, that ye may prosper in all that ye do. Ye stand this day all of you before your ; your captains of your tribes, your , and your officers, with all the men of Israel, Your little ones, your wives, and thy that is in thy camp, from the hewer of thy wood unto the drawer of thy water: That thou shouldest enter into with thy , and into his , which thy maketh with thee this day: That he may establish thee to day for a people unto himself, and that he may be unto thee a , as he hath said unto thee, and as he hath unto thy fathers, to , to , and to . Neither with you only do I make this and this ; But with him that standeth here with us this day before our , and also with him that is not here with us this day: (For ye know how we have dwelt in the land of ; and how we came through the nations which ye passed by; And ye have seen their , and their idols, wood and stone, silver and gold, which were among them:) Lest there should be among you man, or woman, or family, or tribe, whose turneth away this day from our , to go and the gods of these nations; lest there should be among you a root that beareth gall and wormwood; And it come to pass, when he heareth the words of this , that he himself in , saying, I shall have peace, though I walk in the imagination of mine , to add drunkenness to thirst: will not spare him, but then the of and his shall smoke against that man, and all the that are written in this book shall lie upon him, and shall blot out his name from under . And shall separate him unto evil out of all the tribes of Israel, according to all the of that are written in this book of : So that the generation to come of your children that shall rise up after you, and the that shall come from a far land, shall say, when they see the plagues of that land, and the sicknesses which hath laid upon it; And that the whole land thereof is brimstone, and salt, and burning, that it is not sown, nor beareth, nor any grass groweth therein, like the overthrow of , and , Admah, and Zeboim, which overthrew in his , and in his : Even all nations shall say, Wherefore hath done thus unto this land? what meaneth the heat of this great ? Then men shall say, Because they have forsaken of of their fathers, which he made with them when he brought them forth out of the land of : For they went and other gods, and them, gods whom they knew not, and whom he had not given unto them: And the of was kindled against this land, to bring upon it all the that are written in this book: And rooted them out of their land in , and in , and in great , and cast them into another land, as it is this day. The belong unto our : but those things which are belong unto us and to our children for ever, that we may do all the words of this law.
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.