World English Bible · The patriarchs
Job 17
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" is consumed. My days are extinct and the is ready for me. Surely there are mockers with me. My eye dwells on their provocation. "Now give a pledge. Be collateral for me with yourself. Who is there who will strike hands with me? For you have hidden their from understanding, therefore you will not exalt them. He who denounces his friends for plunder, even the eyes of his children will fail. "But he has made me of the people. They spit in . My eye also is dim by reason of sorrow. All my members are as a shadow. Upright men will be astonished at this. The innocent will stir himself up against the godless. Yet will hold to his way. He who has clean hands will grow stronger and stronger. But as for you all, come back. I will not find a man among you. My days are past. My plans are broken off, as are the of . They change the night into day, saying ' is near' in the of . If I look for as my house, if I have spread my couch in , if I have said to corruption, 'You are ,' and to the worm, 'My mother,' and 'My sister,' where then is my ? As for my , who will see it? Shall it go down with me to the of , or descend together into ?"
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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.