King James Version · Egypt and Sinai
Deuteronomy 34
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And went up from unto the mountain of , to the top of , that is over against . And shewed him all the land of , unto Dan, And all , and the land of , and , and all the land of Judah, unto the utmost sea, And the south, and the plain of the valley of , the city of palm trees, unto . And said unto him, This is the land which I sware unto , unto , and unto , saying, I will give it unto thy : I have caused thee to see it with thine eyes, but thou shalt not go over thither. So the there in the land of , according to the word of . And he in a valley in the land of , over against Beth–peor: but no man knoweth of his unto this day. And was an hundred and twenty years old when he : his eye was not dim, nor his natural force abated. And the wept for in thirty days: so the days of weeping and for were ended. And the son of was full of of ; for had upon him: and the hearkened unto him, and did as commanded . And there arose not a since in Israel like unto , whom knew to , In all the signs and the wonders, which sent him to do in the land of to , and to all his servants, and to all his land, 12And in all that mighty hand, and in all the great terror which shewed in the sight of all Israel.
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.