World English Bible · The patriarchs
Job 10
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" is weary of my life. I will give free course to my complaint. I will speak in the bitterness of . I will tell , 'Do not condemn me. Show me why you contend with me. Is it good to you that you should oppress, that you should despise the work of your hands, and smile on the of ? Do you have eyes of ? Or do you see as man sees? Are your days as the days of mortals, or your years as man's years, that you inquire after my , and search after my ? Although you know that I am not , there is no one who can out of your hand. "'Your hands have framed me and fashioned me altogether, yet you destroy me. Remember, I beg you, that you have fashioned me as . Will you bring me into again? Haven't you poured me out like milk, and curdled me like cheese? You have clothed me with skin and , and knit me together with bones and sinews. You have granted me life and . Your visitation has preserved . Yet you hid these things in . I know that this is with you: if I , then you mark me. You will not acquit me from my . If I am , woe to me. If I am , I still will not lift up my head, being filled with , and conscious of my affliction. If my head is held high, you hunt me like a lion. Again you show yourself powerful to me. You renew your against me, and increase your on me. Changes and warfare are with me. "'Why, then, have you brought me out of the ? I wish I had given up , and no eye had seen me. I should have been as though I had not been. I should have been carried from the to the . Aren't my days few? Stop! Leave me alone, that I may find a little comfort, before I go where I will not return from, to the land of and of the shadow of ; the land dark as midnight, of the shadow of , without any order, where is as midnight.'"
A public domain modern English translation, free to read and share. 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.