King James Version · The patriarchs
Genesis 12
Touch any underlined name to see who or where it is. Tap a verse number to see where it is taken up elsewhere. The ✦ marks a verse the New Testament takes up.
Now had said unto , Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy ’s house, unto a land that I will shew thee: And I will make of thee a great nation, and thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a : And them that thee, and him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be . So departed, as had spoken unto him; and went with him: and was seventy and five years old when he departed out of . And took his wife, and his brother’s son, and all their substance that they had gathered, and the that they had gotten in ; and they went forth to go into the land of ; and into the land of they came. And passed through the land unto the place of Sichem, unto the plain of Moreh. And the was then in the land. And appeared unto , and said, Unto thy will I give this land: and there builded he an unto , who appeared unto him. And he removed from thence unto a mountain on the east of Beth–el, and pitched his tent, having Beth–el on the west, and on the east: and there he builded an unto , and called upon the name of . And journeyed, going on still toward the south. And there was a in the land: and went down into to sojourn there; for the was grievous in the land. And it came to pass, when he was come near to enter into , that he said unto his wife, Behold now, I know that thou art a fair woman to look upon: Therefore it shall come to pass, when the shall see thee, that they shall say, This is his wife: and they will kill me, but they will thee alive. Say, I thee, thou art my sister: that it may be well with me for thy sake; and shall live because of thee. And it came to pass, that, when was come into , the beheld the woman that she was very fair. The princes also of saw her, and commended her before : and the woman was taken into ’s house. And he entreated well for her sake: and he had sheep, and oxen, and he asses, and menservants, and maidservants, and she asses, and camels. And plagued and his house with great plagues because of ’s wife. And called , and said, What is this that thou hast done unto me? why didst thou not tell me that she was thy wife? 19Why saidst thou, She is my sister? so I might have taken her to me to wife: now therefore behold thy wife, take her, and go thy way. And commanded his men concerning him: and they sent him away, and his wife, and all that he had.
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 · The patriarchs, 2000 BC to 1600 BC ›
Abraham's family as herdsmen among settled Canaanite city-states, in a world where Egypt and Mesopotamia are the great powers and Canaan is the corridor between them.
- Mesopotamia
- Abraham's own century is Hammurabi's. The great empire of Ur has already fallen, and Babylon rises under a king who published a law code on a stone pillar for everyone to see. Reading Genesis alongside Hammurabi's laws is illuminating in both directions: some provisions are strikingly similar, and the places where Israel's later law diverges are the places worth stopping at.
- Egypt
- The Middle Kingdom, wealthy, bureaucratic, and organised around the Nile flood. Egyptian tomb paintings from this period show Semitic traders arriving with donkeys and striped cloaks, which is more or less the picture Genesis gives of a family going down to Egypt in a famine. Toward the end of the era the Hyksos, rulers of Semitic origin, take the delta.
- Anatolia and the Aegean
- Assyrian merchants run a long-distance trading colony at Kanesh in Anatolia, leaving thousands of clay letters about copper, tin, and debt. On Crete the Minoan palaces are at their height, with plumbing, frescoes, and a script nobody has yet read.
- Further afield
- The Indus Valley cities are in decline after centuries of grid-planned streets and drains. In China the Erlitou culture is building the first palace complexes. Stonehenge is standing and already old.
All of Genesis