King James Version · Egypt and Sinai
Exodus 17
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And all of the journeyed from of , after their journeys, according to the of , and pitched in : and there was no water for the people to drink. Wherefore the people did chide with , and said, Give us water that we may drink. And said unto them, Why chide ye with me? wherefore do ye ? And the people thirsted there for water; and the people murmured against , and said, Wherefore is this that thou hast brought us up out of , to kill us and our children and our cattle with thirst? And cried unto , saying, What shall I do unto this people? they be almost ready to stone me. And said unto , Go on before the people, and take with thee of the ; and thy , wherewith thou smotest the river, take in thine hand, and go. Behold, I will stand before thee there upon in ; and thou shalt smite , and there shall come water out of it, that the people may drink. And did so in the sight of the . And he called the name of the place , and , because of the chiding of the , and because they , saying, Is among us, or not? Then came , and fought with Israel in . And said unto , Choose us out men, and go out, fight with : to morrow I will stand on the top of the hill with the of in mine hand. So did as had said to him, and fought with : and , , and went up to the top of the hill. And it came to pass, when held up his hand, that Israel prevailed: and when he let down his hand, prevailed. But ’ hands were heavy; and they took a stone, and put it under him, and he sat thereon; and and stayed up his hands, the one on the one side, and the other on the other side; and his hands were steady until the going down of the sun. And discomfited and his people with the edge of . And said unto , Write this for a memorial in a book, and rehearse it in the ears of : for I will utterly put out the remembrance of from under . And built an , and called the name of it –nissi: For he said, Because hath that will have war with from generation to generation.
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.