World English Bible · The patriarchs
Job 2
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Again, on the day when came to present themselves before , came also among them to present himself before . said to , "Where have you come from?" answered , and said, "From going back and forth in the earth, and from walking up and down in it." said to , "Have you considered my servant ? For there is no one like him in the earth, a blameless and an upright man, one who fears , and turns away from evil. He still maintains his integrity, although you incited me against him, to him without cause." answered , and said, "Skin for skin. Yes, all that a man has he will give for his life. But stretch out your hand now, and touch his bone and his , and he will renounce you to your ." said to , "Behold, he is in your hand. Only spare his life." So went out from the of , and struck with painful sores from the sole of his foot to his head. He took for himself a potsherd to scrape himself with, and he sat among the . Then his wife said to him, "Do you still maintain your integrity? Renounce , and ." But he said to her, "You speak as one of the foolish women would speak. What? Shall we receive good at the hand of , and shall we not receive evil?" In all this didn't with his . Now when three friends heard of all this evil that had come on him, they each came from his own place: the Temanite, the Shuhite, and the Naamathite; and they made an appointment together to come to sympathize with him and to comfort him. When they lifted up their eyes from a distance, and didn't recognize him, they their voices, and wept; and they each tore his robe, and sprinkled on their heads toward . So they sat down with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his grief was very great.
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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.