King James Version · Egypt and Sinai
Exodus 1
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Now these are the names of the , which came into ; every man and his household came with . , , , and Judah, , , and , 4Dan, and , Gad, and Asher. And all the that came out of the loins of were seventy : for was in already. And , and all his brethren, and all that generation. And the were fruitful, and increased abundantly, and multiplied, and waxed exceeding mighty; and the land was filled with them. Now there arose up a new king over , which knew not . And he said unto his people, Behold, the people of the are more and mightier than we: Come on, let us deal wisely with them; lest they multiply, and it come to pass, that, when there falleth out any war, they join also unto our , and fight against us, and so get them up out of the land. Therefore they did set over them taskmasters to afflict them with their burdens. And they built for cities, and . But the more they afflicted them, the more they multiplied and grew. And they were grieved because of the . And the made the to with rigour: And they made their lives bitter with hard bondage, in morter, and in brick, and in all manner of in the field: all their , wherein they made them , was with rigour. 15And the king of spake to the midwives, of which the name of the one was , and the name of the other : And he said, When ye do the office of a midwife to the women, and see them upon the stools; if it be a son, then ye shall kill him: but if it be a daughter, then she shall live. But the midwives feared , and did not as the king of commanded them, but the men children alive. And the king of called for the midwives, and said unto them, Why have ye done this thing, and have the men children alive? And the midwives said unto , Because the women are not as the women; for they are lively, and are ere the midwives come in unto them. Therefore dealt well with the midwives: and the people multiplied, and waxed very mighty. And it came to pass, because the midwives feared , that he made them houses. And charged all his people, saying, Every son that is born ye shall cast into the river, and every daughter ye shall alive.
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.