King James Version · The patriarchs
Job 19
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1Then answered and said, How long will ye vex , and break me in pieces with words? These ten times have ye reproached me: ye are not that ye make yourselves strange to me. And be it indeed that I have erred, mine error remaineth with myself. If indeed ye will magnify yourselves against me, and plead against me my : Know now that hath overthrown me, and hath compassed me with his net. Behold, I cry out of wrong, but I am not heard: I cry aloud, but there is no . He hath fenced up my way that I cannot pass, and he hath set in my . He hath stripped me of my , and taken the from my head. He hath destroyed me on every side, and I am gone: and mine hath he removed like a tree. He hath also kindled his against me, and he counteth me unto him as one of his . His troops come together, and raise up their way against me, and encamp round about my . He hath put my brethren far from me, and mine acquaintance are verily estranged from me. My kinsfolk have failed, and my familiar friends have forgotten me. They that in mine house, and my maids, count me for a : I am an alien in their sight. I called my servant, and he gave me no answer; I intreated him with my . My breath is strange to my wife, though I intreated for the children’s sake of mine own body. Yea, young children despised me; I arose, and they spake against me. All my inward friends abhorred me: and they whom I loved are turned against me. My bone cleaveth to my skin and to my , and I am escaped with the skin of my teeth. Have upon me, have upon me, O ye my friends; for the hand of hath touched me. Why do ye persecute me as , and are not satisfied with my ? Oh that my words were now written! oh that they were printed in a book! That they were graven with an iron pen and lead in for ever! For I know that my liveth, and that he shall stand at the upon the earth: And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my shall I see : Whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not another; though my reins be consumed within me. But ye should say, Why persecute we him, seeing the root of the matter is found in me? Be ye afraid of : for bringeth the punishments of , that ye may know there is a .
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.