World English Bible · The patriarchs
Job 12
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1Then answered, "No doubt, but you are the people, and will with you. But I have understanding as well as you; I am not inferior to you. Yes, who doesn't know such things as these? I am like one who is a joke to his neighbor, I, who called on , and he answered. The , the blameless man is a joke. In the thought of him who is at ease there is contempt for misfortune. It is ready for them whose foot slips. The tents of robbers prosper. Those who provoke are secure, who carry their in their hands. "But ask the animals now, and they will teach you; the birds of , and they will tell you. 8Or speak to the earth, and it will teach you. The fish of the sea will declare to you. Who doesn't know that in all these, hand has done this, in whose hand is the life of every living thing, and the breath of all mankind? Doesn't the ear try words, even as the palate tastes its food? With aged men is , in length of days understanding. "With is and might. He has and understanding. Behold, he breaks down, and it can't be built again. He imprisons a man, and there can be no . Behold, he withholds the waters, and they dry up. Again, he sends them out, and they overturn the earth. With him is strength and . The deceived and the deceiver are his. He leads away stripped. He makes judges fools. He loosens the bond of kings. He binds their waist with a belt. He leads priests away stripped, and overthrows the mighty. He removes the speech of those who are trusted, and takes away the understanding of the . He pours contempt on princes, and loosens the belt of the strong. He uncovers deep things out of , and brings out to the shadow of . He increases the nations, and he destroys them. He enlarges the nations, and he leads them . He takes away understanding from the chiefs of the people of the earth, and causes them to wander in a where there is no way. They grope in the dark without . He makes them stagger like a drunken man.
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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.