World English Bible · The patriarchs
Job 29
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again took up his , and said, "Oh that I were as in the months of old, as in the days when watched over me; when his lamp shone on my head, and by his I walked through , as I was in my prime, when the friendship of was in my tent, when was yet with me, and my children were around me, when my steps were washed with butter, and poured out streams of oil for me, when I went out to , when I prepared my seat in the street. The young men saw me and hid themselves. The aged rose up and stood. The princes refrained from talking, and laid their hand on their . The voice of the nobles was hushed, and their stuck to the roof of their . For when the ear heard me, then it me, and when the eye saw me, it commended me, because I who cried, and also, who had no one to help him, the of him who was ready to came on me, and I caused the to sing for joy. I put on , and it clothed me. My justice was as a robe and a . I was eyes to the blind, and feet to the lame. I was a to . I researched the cause of him whom I didn't know. I broke the jaws of the unrighteous and plucked the prey out of his teeth. Then I said, 'I will in my own house, I will count my days as the sand. My root is spread out to the waters. The lies all night on my branch. My is fresh in me. My bow is renewed in my hand.' "Men listened to me, waited, and kept silence for my . After my words they didn't speak again. My speech fell on them. They waited for me as for the . Their mouths drank as with the spring . I smiled on them when they had no confidence. They didn't reject of . I chose out their way, and sat as chief. I lived as a king in the army, as one who comforts the mourners.
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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.