World English Bible · The patriarchs
Job 15
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Then the Temanite answered, "Should a man answer with knowledge, and fill himself with the east wind? Should he reason with unprofitable talk, or with speeches with which he can do no good? Yes, you do away with fear, and hinder devotion before . For your teaches your , and you choose the language of the crafty. Your own condemns you, and not I. Yes, your own testify against you. "Are you the first man who was born? Or were you brought out before the hills? Have you heard the secret of ? Do you limit to yourself? What do you know that we don't know? What do you understand which is not in us? With us are both the gray-headed and the very aged men, much older than your . Are the consolations of too small for you, even the word that is gentle toward you? Why does carry you away? Why do your eyes flash, that you turn your against , and let such words go out of your ? What is man, that he should be clean? What is he who is born of a woman, that he should be ? Behold, he puts no in his . Yes, are not clean in his sight; how much less one who is and corrupt, a man who drinks like water! "I will show you, listen to me; that which I have seen I will declare (which men have told by their fathers, and have not hidden it; to whom alone the land was given, and no passed among them): man writhes in pain all his days, even the number of years that are laid up for the oppressor. A sound of terrors is in his ears. In prosperity will come on him. He doesn't that he will return out of . He is waited for . He wanders abroad for bread, saying, 'Where is it?' He knows that the day of is ready at his hand. Distress and anguish make him afraid. They prevail against him, as a king ready to the battle. Because he has stretched out his hand against , and behaves himself proudly against , he runs at him with a stiff neck, with the thick shields of his bucklers, because he has covered with his fatness, and gathered fat on his thighs. He has lived in desolate cities, in houses which no one inhabited, which were ready to become heaps. He will not be rich, neither will his substance continue, neither will their possessions be extended on the earth. He will not depart out of . The flame will dry up his . He will go away by the breath of . Let him not in emptiness, deceiving himself, for emptiness will be his reward. It will be accomplished before his time. His branch will not be green. He will shake off his unripe grape as , and will cast off his flower as the olive tree. For the company of the godless will be , and will consume the tents of bribery. They conceive mischief and produce . Their prepares deceit."
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.