King James Version · The patriarchs
Genesis 50
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And fell upon his ’s , and wept upon him, and kissed him. And commanded his servants the physicians to embalm his : and the physicians embalmed Israel. And forty days were fulfilled for him; for so are fulfilled the days of those which are embalmed: and the mourned for him threescore and ten days. And when the days of his were past, spake unto the house of , saying, If now I have found in your eyes, speak, I you, in the ears of , saying, made me , saying, Lo, I : in my which I have digged for me in the land of , there shalt thou bury me. Now therefore let me go up, I thee, and bury , and I will come again. And said, Go up, and bury thy , according as he made thee . And went up to bury his : and with him went up all the servants of , the of his house, and all the of the land of , And all the , and his brethren, and his ’s house: only their little ones, and their flocks, and their herds, they left in the land of . And there went up with him both chariots and horsemen: and it was a very great company. And they came to the threshingfloor of Atad, which is beyond Jordan, and there they mourned with a great and very sore : and he made a for his seven days. And when the inhabitants of the land, , saw the in the floor of Atad, they said, This is a grievous to the : wherefore the name of it was called –mizraim, which is beyond Jordan. And his sons did unto him according as he commanded them: For his sons carried him into the land of , and in the cave of the field of , which bought with the field for a possession of a buryingplace of the , before . 14And returned into , he, and his brethren, and all that went up with him to bury his , after he had buried his . And when ’s brethren saw that their was , they said, will peradventure hate us, and will certainly requite us all the evil which we did unto him. And they sent a unto , saying, Thy did command before he , saying, So shall ye say unto , Forgive, I thee now, the trespass of thy brethren, and their ; for they did unto thee evil: and now, we thee, forgive the trespass of the servants of the of thy . And wept when they spake unto him. And his brethren also went and fell down before ; and they said, Behold, we be thy servants. And said unto them, Fear not: for am I in the place of ? But as for you, ye thought evil against me; but meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to much people alive. Now therefore fear ye not: I will nourish you, and your little ones. And he comforted them, and spake kindly unto them. 22And dwelt in , he, and his ’s house: and lived an hundred and ten years. And saw ’s children of the third generation: the children also of the son of were brought up upon ’s knees. And said unto his brethren, I : and will surely visit you, and bring you out of this land unto the land which he sware to , to , and to . And took an of the , saying, will surely visit you, and ye shall carry up my bones from hence. So , being an hundred and ten years old: and they embalmed him, and he was put in a coffin in .
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