King James Version · The patriarchs
Genesis 28
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And called , and him, and charged him, and said unto him, Thou shalt not take a wife of the daughters of . Arise, go to Padan–aram, to the house of thy mother’s ; and take thee a wife from thence of the daughters of thy mother’s brother. And thee, and make thee fruitful, and multiply thee, that thou mayest be a multitude of people; And give thee the of , to thee, and to thy with thee; that thou mayest the land wherein thou art a , which gave unto . 5And sent away : and he went to Padan–aram unto , son of the , the brother of , ’s and ’s mother. When saw that had , and sent him away to Padan–aram, to take him a wife from thence; and that as he him he gave him a charge, saying, Thou shalt not take a wife of the daughters of ; And that his and his mother, and was gone to Padan–aram; And seeing that the daughters of pleased not his ; Then went unto , and took unto the wives which he had the daughter of ’s son, the sister of Nebajoth, to be his wife. And went out from Beer–sheba, and went toward . And he lighted upon a certain place, and tarried there all night, because the sun was set; and he took of the stones of that place, and put them for his pillows, and lay down in that place to sleep. And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to : and behold the of ascending and descending on it. And, behold, stood above it, and said, I am of thy , and the of : the land whereon thou liest, to thee will I give it, and to thy ; And thy shall be as of the earth, and thou shalt spread abroad to the west, and to the east, and to the north, and to the south: and in thee and in thy shall all the families of the earth be . And, behold, I am with thee, and will keep thee in all places whither thou goest, and will bring thee again into this land; for I will not leave thee, until I have done that which I have spoken to thee of. And awaked out of his sleep, and he said, Surely is in this place; and I knew it not. And he was afraid, and said, How dreadful is this place! this is none other but the house of , and this is the of . And rose up early in the morning, and took the stone that he had put for his pillows, and set it up for a pillar, and poured oil upon the top of it. And he called the name of that place Beth–el: but the name of that city was called at the first. And a , saying, If will be with me, and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat, and raiment to put on, So that I come again to ’s house in peace; then shall be my : And this stone, which I have set for a pillar, shall be ’s house: and of all that thou shalt give me I will surely give the tenth unto thee.
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