King James Version · The patriarchs
Job 16
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1Then answered and said, I have heard many such things: miserable comforters are ye all. Shall words have an end? or what emboldeneth thee that thou answerest? I also could speak as ye do: if your were in ’s stead, I could heap up words against you, and shake mine head at you. But I would strengthen you with my , and the moving of my should asswage your grief. Though I speak, my grief is not asswaged: and though I forbear, what am I eased? But now he hath made me weary: thou hast made desolate all my company. And thou hast filled me with wrinkles, which is a against me: and my leanness rising up in me beareth to . He teareth me in his , who hateth me: he gnasheth upon me with his teeth; mine enemy sharpeneth his eyes upon me. They have gaped upon me with their ; they have smitten me upon the cheek reproachfully; they have gathered themselves together against me. hath me to the ungodly, and turned me over into the hands of . I was at ease, but he hath broken me asunder: he hath also taken me by my neck, and shaken me to pieces, and set me up for his mark. His archers compass me round about, he cleaveth my reins asunder, and doth not spare; he poureth out my gall upon the ground. He breaketh me with breach upon breach, he runneth upon me like a giant. I have sewed upon my skin, and defiled my in . is foul with weeping, and on my eyelids is the shadow of ; Not for any injustice in mine hands: also my is pure. O earth, cover not thou my , and let my cry have no place. Also now, behold, my is in , and my record is on high. My friends scorn me: but mine eye poureth out tears unto . O that one might plead for a man with , as a man pleadeth for his neighbour! When years are come, then I shall go whence I shall not return.
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.