King James Version · The patriarchs
Genesis 13
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And went up out of , he, and his wife, and all that he had, and with him, into the south. And was very rich in cattle, in silver, and in gold. And he went on his journeys from the south even to Beth–el, unto the place where his tent had been at the beginning, between Beth–el and ; Unto the place of the , which he had made there at the first: and there called on the name of . And also, which went with , had flocks, and herds, and tents. And the land was not able to bear them, that they might together: for their substance was great, so that they could not together. And there was a strife between the herdmen of ’s cattle and the herdmen of ’s cattle: and the and the dwelled then in the land. And said unto , Let there be no strife, I thee, between me and thee, and between my herdmen and thy herdmen; for we be brethren. Is not the whole land before thee? separate thyself, I thee, from me: if thou wilt take the left hand, then I will go to the right; or if thou depart to , then I will go to the left. And lifted up his eyes, and beheld all the plain of Jordan, that it was well watered every where, before destroyed and , even as the garden of , like the land of , as thou comest unto . Then chose him all the plain of Jordan; and journeyed east: and they separated themselves the one from the other. dwelled in the land of , and dwelled in the cities of the plain, and pitched his tent toward . But the men of were and before exceedingly. And said unto , after that was separated from him, Lift up now thine eyes, and look from the place where thou art northward, and southward, and eastward, and westward: For all the land which thou seest, to thee will I give it, and to thy for ever. And I will make thy as of the earth: so that if a man can number of the earth, then shall thy also be numbered. Arise, walk through the land in the length of it and in the breadth of it; for I will give it unto thee. Then removed his tent, and came and dwelt in the plain of , which is in , and built there an unto .
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