King James Version · The patriarchs
Genesis 22
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And it came to pass after these things, that did , and said unto him, : and he said, Behold, here I am. And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son , whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of. And rose up early in the morning, and saddled his ass, and took two of his young men with him, and his son, and clave the wood for the burnt offering, and rose up, and went unto the place of which had told him. Then on the third day lifted up his eyes, and saw the place afar off. And said unto his young men, ye here with the ass; and I and the lad will go yonder and , and come again to you. And took the wood of the burnt offering, and laid it upon his son; and he took the in his hand, and a knife; and they went both of them together. And spake unto his , and said, : and he said, Here am I, my son. And he said, Behold the and the wood: but where is for a burnt offering? And said, My son, will provide himself for a burnt offering: so they went both of them together. And they came to the place which had told him of; and built an there, and laid the wood in order, and bound his son, and laid him on the upon the wood. And stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to his son. And called unto him out of , and said, , : and he said, Here am I. And he said, Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou any thing unto him: for now I know that thou fearest , seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from me. And lifted up his eyes, and looked, and behold behind him a ram caught in a thicket by his : and went and took the ram, and offered him up for a burnt offering in the stead of his son. And called the name of that place –jireh: as it is said to this day, In the mount of it shall be seen. 15And called unto out of the second time, And said, By myself have I , saith , for because thou hast done this thing, and hast not withheld thy son, thine only son: That in thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy as the stars of the , and as the sand which is upon the sea shore; and thy shall possess the of his ; And in thy shall all the nations of the earth be ; because thou hast . So returned unto his young men, and they rose up and went together to Beer–sheba; and dwelt at Beer–sheba. And it came to pass after these things, that it was told , saying, Behold, , she hath also born children unto thy brother ; Huz his , and his brother, and Kemuel of , 22And Chesed, and Hazo, and Pildash, and Jidlaph, and . And begat : these eight did bear to , ’s brother. And , whose name was , she also Tebah, and Gaham, and Thahash, and Maachah.
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