World English Bible · The patriarchs
Job 26
Touch any underlined name to see who or where it is. Tap a verse number to see where it is taken up elsewhere.
1Then answered, "How have you helped him who is without ! How have you the arm that has no strength! How have you counseled him who has no , and plentifully declared sound knowledge! To whom have you uttered words? Whose came out of you? "The departed spirits tremble, those beneath the waters and all that live in them. is before , and has no covering. He stretches out the north over empty space, and hangs the earth on nothing. He binds up the waters in his thick clouds, and the cloud is not burst under them. He encloses the of his , and spreads his cloud on it. He has described a boundary on the surface of the waters, and to the confines of and . The pillars of tremble and are astonished at his rebuke. He stirs up the sea with his , and by his understanding he strikes through . By his are garnished. His hand has pierced the swift . Behold, these are but the outskirts of his ways. How small a whisper do we hear of him! But the thunder of his who can understand?"
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.