King James Version · The patriarchs
Genesis 49
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And called unto his sons, and said, Gather yourselves together, that I may tell you that which shall befall you . Gather yourselves together, and hear, ye sons of ; and unto Israel your . , thou art my , my might, and the beginning of my strength, the excellency of dignity, and the excellency of : Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel; because thou wentest up to thy ’s bed; then defiledst thou it: he went up to my couch. and are brethren; instruments of are in their habitations. O , come not thou into their secret; unto their , mine , be not thou united: for in their they slew a man, and in their selfwill they digged down a wall. be their , for it was fierce; and their , for it was cruel: I will divide them in , and scatter them in Israel. Judah, thou art he whom thy brethren shall : thy hand shall be in the neck of thine ; thy ’s children shall before thee. Judah is a lion’s whelp: from the prey, my son, thou art gone up: he stooped down, he couched as a lion, and as an old lion; who shall rouse him up? The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until come; and unto him shall the gathering of the people be. Binding his foal unto , and his ass’s colt unto the choice ; he washed his garments in , and his clothes in of grapes: 12His eyes shall be red with , and his teeth white with milk. shall at the haven of the sea; and he shall be for an haven of ships; and his border shall be unto Zidon. is a strong ass couching down between two burdens: And he saw that rest was good, and the land that it was pleasant; and bowed his shoulder to bear, and became a servant unto tribute. Dan shall judge his people, as one of the tribes of Israel. Dan shall be a by , an adder in , that biteth the horse heels, so that his rider shall fall backward. I have waited for thy , O . Gad, a troop shall overcome him: but he shall overcome at the last. Out of Asher his bread shall be fat, and he shall yield royal dainties. is a hind let loose: he giveth goodly words. is a fruitful bough, even a fruitful bough by a well; whose run over the wall: The archers have sorely grieved him, and shot at him, and hated him: But his bow abode in strength, and the arms of his hands were made strong by the hands of the mighty of ; (from thence is the , the stone of Israel:) Even by the of thy , who shall help thee; and by , who shall thee with of above, of the deep that lieth under, of the breasts, and of the : The of thy have prevailed above the of my progenitors unto the utmost bound of the hills: they shall be on the head of , and on the of the head of him that was separate from his brethren. shall ravin as a wolf: in the morning he shall devour the prey, and at night he shall divide the spoil. All these are the twelve tribes of Israel: and this is it that their spake unto them, and them; every one according to his he them. And he charged them, and said unto them, I am to be gathered unto my people: bury me with my fathers in the cave that is in the field of the , In the cave that is in the field of , which is before , in the land of , which bought with the field of the for a possession of a buryingplace. There they buried and his wife; there they buried and his wife; and there I buried . The purchase of the field and of the cave that is therein was from the children of . And when had made an end of commanding his sons, he gathered up his feet into the bed, and yielded up the ghost, and was gathered unto his people.
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