World English Bible · Egypt and Sinai
Exodus 1
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Now these are the names of the , who came into (every man and his household came with ): , , , and Judah, , , and , 4Dan and , Gad and Asher. All the who came out of body were seventy , and was in already. , as did all his brothers, and all that generation. The were fruitful, and increased abundantly, and multiplied, and grew exceedingly mighty; and the land was filled with them. Now there arose a new king over , who didn't know . He said to his people, "Behold, the people of the are more and mightier than we. Come, let's deal wisely with them, lest they multiply, and it happen that when any war breaks out, they also join themselves to our and fight against us, and escape out of the land." Therefore they set taskmasters over them to afflict them with their burdens. They built storage cities for : and . But the more they afflicted them, the more they multiplied and the more they spread out. They started to dread the . The ruthlessly made the , and they made their lives bitter with hard in mortar and in brick, and in all kinds of in the field, all their , in which they ruthlessly made them . 15The king of spoke to the midwives, of whom the name of the one was , and the name of the other , and he said, "When you perform the duty of a midwife to the women, and see them on the birth stool, if it is a son, then you shall kill him; but if it is a daughter, then she shall live." But the midwives feared , and didn't do what the king of commanded them, but the baby boys alive. The king of called for the midwives, and said to them, "Why have you done this thing and the boys alive?" The midwives said to , "Because the women aren't like the women; for they are vigorous and give birth before the midwife comes to them." dealt well with the midwives, and the people multiplied, and grew very mighty. Because the midwives feared , he gave them families. commanded all his people, saying, "You shall cast every son who is born into the river, and every daughter you shall alive."
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.