World English Bible · The patriarchs
Job 14
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"Man, who is born of a woman, is of few days, and full of trouble. He grows up like a flower, and is cut down. He also flees like a shadow, and doesn't continue. Do you open your eyes on such a one, and bring me into with you? Who can bring a clean thing out of an ? Not one. Seeing his days are determined, the number of his months is with you, and you have appointed his bounds that he can't pass. Look away from him, that he may rest, until he accomplishes, as a hireling, his day. "For there is for a tree if it is cut down, that it will sprout again, that the tender branch of it will not cease. Though its root grows old in the earth, and its stock dies in the ground, yet through the scent of water it will bud, and sprout boughs like a plant. But man dies, and is laid low. Yes, man gives up , and where is he? As the waters fail from the sea, and the river wastes and dries up, so man lies down and doesn't rise. Until are no more, they will not awake, nor be roused out of their sleep. "Oh that you would hide me in , that you would keep me secret until your is past, that you would appoint me a and remember me! If a man dies, will he live again? I would wait all the days of my warfare, until my should come. You would call, and I would answer you. You would have a for the work of your hands. But now you count my steps. Don't you watch over my ? My is sealed up in a bag. You fasten up my . "But the mountain falling comes to nothing. is removed out of its place. The waters wear the stones. The torrents of it wash away of the earth. So you destroy the of man. You prevail against him, and he departs. You change , and send him away. His sons come to , and he doesn't know it. They are brought low, but he doesn't perceive it of them. But his on him has pain, and his within him mourns."
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.