World English Bible · The patriarchs
Job 19
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1Then answered, "How long will you torment me, and crush me with words? You have reproached me ten times. You aren't that you attack me. If it is true that I have erred, my error with myself. If indeed you will magnify yourselves against me, and plead against me my , know now that has subverted me, and has surrounded me with his net. "Behold, I cry out of wrong, but I am not heard. I cry for help, but there is no justice. He has walled up my way so that I can't pass, and has set in my . He has stripped me of my , and taken the from my head. He has broken me down on every side, and I am gone. He has plucked my up like a tree. He has also kindled his against me. He counts me among his . His troops come on together, build a siege ramp against me, and encamp around my tent. "He has put my brothers far from me. My acquaintances are wholly estranged from me. My relatives have gone away. My familiar friends have forgotten me. Those who in my house and my maids consider me a . I am an alien in their sight. I call to my servant, and he gives me no answer. I beg him with my . My breath is offensive to my wife. I am loathsome to the children of my own mother. Even young children despise me. If I arise, they speak against me. All my familiar friends abhor me. They whom I loved have turned against me. My bones stick to my skin and to my . I have escaped by the skin of my teeth. "Have on me. Have on me, you my friends, for the hand of has touched me. Why do you persecute me as , and are not satisfied with my ? "Oh that my words were now written! Oh that they were inscribed in a book! That with an iron pen and lead they were engraved in ! But as for me, I know that my lives. In the end, he will stand upon the earth. After my skin is destroyed, then I will see in my , whom I, even I, will see on my side. My eyes will see, and not as a . " is consumed within me. If you say, 'How we will persecute him!' because the root of the matter is found in me, be afraid of , for brings the punishments of , that you may know there is a ."
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.