King James Version · The patriarchs
Job 29
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Moreover continued his , and said, Oh that I were as in months past, as in the days when preserved me; When his candle shined upon my head, and when by his I walked through ; As I was in the days of my youth, when the secret of was upon my ; When was yet with me, when my children were about me; When I washed my steps with butter, and poured me out rivers of oil; When I went out to the through the city, when I prepared my seat in the street! The young men saw me, and hid themselves: and the aged arose, and stood up. The princes refrained talking, and laid their hand on their . The nobles held their peace, and their cleaved to the roof of their . When the ear heard me, then it me; and when the eye saw me, it gave to me: Because I that cried, and , and him that had none to help him. The of him that was ready to came upon me: and I caused the ’s to sing for joy. I put on , and it clothed me: my was as a robe and a . I was eyes to the blind, and feet was I to the lame. I was a to : and the cause which I knew not I searched out. And I brake the jaws of , and plucked the spoil out of his teeth. Then I said, I shall in my nest, and I shall multiply my days as the sand. My root was spread out by the waters, and the lay all night upon my branch. My was fresh in me, and my bow was renewed in my hand. Unto me men gave ear, and waited, and kept silence at my . After my words they spake not again; and my speech dropped upon them. And they waited for me as for the ; and they opened their wide as for the . If I laughed on them, they it not; and of my countenance they cast not down. I chose out their way, and sat chief, and dwelt as a king in the army, as one that comforteth the mourners.
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.