King James Version · Egypt and Sinai
Exodus 24
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And he said unto , Come up unto , thou, and , , and , and seventy of the ; and ye afar off. And alone shall come near : but they shall not come nigh; neither shall the people go up with him. And came and told the people all the words of , and all : and all the people answered with one voice, and said, All the words which hath said will we do. And wrote all the words of , and rose up early in the morning, and builded an under the hill, and twelve pillars, according to the twelve tribes of Israel. And he sent young men of the , which offered burnt offerings, and of oxen unto . And took half of , and put it in basons; and half of he sprinkled on the . And he took the book of , and read in the audience of the people: and they said, All that hath said will we do, and be obedient. And took , and sprinkled it on the people, and said, Behold of , which hath made with you concerning all these words. Then went up , and , , and , and seventy of the : And they saw the of Israel: and there was as it were a paved work of a sapphire stone, and as it were the body of in his clearness. And upon the nobles of the he laid not his hand: also they saw , and did eat and drink. And said unto , Come up to me into the mount, and be there: and I will give thee tables of stone, and a law, and which I have written; that thou mayest teach them. And rose up, and his minister : and went up into the mount of . And he said unto the , Tarry ye here for us, until we come again unto you: and, behold, and are with you: if any man have any matters to do, let him come unto them. And went up into the mount, and a cloud covered the mount. And abode upon , and it six days: and the seventh day he called unto out of the midst of the cloud. And the sight of was like devouring on the top of the mount in the eyes of the . And went into the midst of the cloud, and gat him up into the mount: and was in the mount forty days and forty nights.
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.