King James Version · The patriarchs
Job 2
Touch any underlined name to see who or where it is. Tap a verse number to see where it is taken up elsewhere.
Again there was a day when came to present themselves before , and came also among them to present himself before . And said unto , From whence comest thou? And answered , and said, From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it. And said unto , Hast thou considered my servant , that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth , and escheweth evil? and still he holdeth his integrity, although thou movedst me against him, to destroy him without cause. And answered , and said, Skin for skin, yea, all that a man hath will he give for his life. But put forth thine hand now, and touch his bone and his , and he will thee to thy . And said unto , Behold, he is in thine hand; but his life. So went forth from the of , and smote with sore boils from the sole of his foot unto his . And he took him a potsherd to scrape himself withal; and he sat down among the . Then said his wife unto him, Dost thou still retain thine integrity? , and . But he said unto her, Thou speakest as one of the foolish women speaketh. What? shall we receive good at the hand of , and shall we not receive evil? In all this did not with his . Now when ’s three friends heard of all this evil that was come upon him, they came every one from his own place; the Temanite, and the Shuhite, and the Naamathite: for they had made an appointment together to come to mourn with him and to comfort him. And when they lifted up their eyes afar off, and knew him not, they lifted up their voice, and wept; and they rent every one his mantle, and sprinkled upon their heads toward . So they sat down with him upon the ground seven days and seven nights, and none spake a word unto him: for they saw that his grief was very great.
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.