King James Version · The patriarchs
Genesis 16
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Now ’s wife him : and she had an handmaid, an , whose name was . And said unto , Behold now, hath restrained me from bearing: I thee, go in unto my maid; it may be that I may obtain children by her. And hearkened to the voice of . And ’s wife took her maid the , after had dwelt ten years in the land of , and gave her to her husband to be his wife. And he went in unto , and she conceived: and when she saw that she had conceived, her mistress was despised in her eyes. And said unto , My wrong be upon thee: I have given my maid into thy ; and when she saw that she had conceived, I was despised in her eyes: judge between me and thee. But said unto , Behold, thy maid is in thy hand; do to her as it pleaseth thee. And when dealt hardly with her, she fled from her . And found her by a fountain of water in , by the fountain in to . And he said, , ’s maid, whence camest thou? and whither wilt thou go? And she said, I flee from the of my mistress . And said unto her, Return to thy mistress, and submit thyself under her hands. And said unto her, I will multiply thy exceedingly, that it shall not be numbered for multitude. And said unto her, Behold, thou art with child, and shalt bear a son, and shalt call his name ; because hath heard thy affliction. And he will be a wild man; his hand will be against every man, and every man’s hand against him; and he shall in the of all his brethren. And she called the name of that spake unto her, Thou seest me: for she said, Have I also here looked after him that seeth me? Wherefore the well was called Beer–lahai–roi; behold, it is between and . And a son: and called his son’s name, which , . 16And was fourscore and six years old, when to .
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