King James Version · The patriarchs
Genesis 15
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After these things unto in a , saying, Fear not, : I am thy shield, and thy exceeding great reward. And said, , what wilt thou give me, seeing I go , and the steward of my house is this of ? And said, Behold, to me thou hast given no : and, lo, one born in my house is mine . And, behold, unto him, saying, This shall not be thine ; but he that shall come forth out of thine own bowels shall be thine . And he brought him forth abroad, and said, Look now toward , and tell the stars, if thou be able to number them: and he said unto him, So shall thy be. And he in ; and he counted it to him for . And he said unto him, I am that brought thee out of of the Chaldees, to give thee this land to it. And he said, , whereby shall I know that I shall it? And he said unto him, Take me an heifer of three years old, and a she goat of three years old, and a ram of three years old, and a turtledove, and a young pigeon. And he took unto him all these, and divided them in the midst, and laid each piece one against another: but the birds divided he not. And when the fowls came down upon the carcases, drove them away. And when the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon ; and, lo, an horror of great fell upon him. And he said unto , Know of a surety that thy shall be a in a land that is not theirs, and shall them; and they shall afflict them four hundred years; And also that nation, whom they shall , will I judge: and afterward shall they come out with great substance. And thou shalt go to thy fathers in peace; thou shalt be buried in a good old age. But in the fourth generation they shall come hither again: for the of the is not yet full. And it came to pass, that, when the sun went down, and it was dark, behold a smoking furnace, and a burning lamp that passed between those pieces. In the same day made a with , saying, Unto thy have I given this land, from the river of unto the great river, the river : The , and the Kenizzites, and the Kadmonites, And the , and the , and the Rephaims, And the , and , and the , and the .
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