World English Bible · The patriarchs
Job 3
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After this opened his , and the day of his birth. 2 answered: "Let the day in which I was born, the night which said, 'There is a boy conceived.' Let that day be . Don't let from above seek for it, neither let shine on it. Let and the shadow of claim it for their own. Let a cloud on it. Let all that makes the day black terrify it. 6As for that night, let thick seize on it. Let it not rejoice among the days of the year. Let it not come into the number of the months. Behold, let that night be . Let no joyful voice come therein. Let them it who the day, who are ready to rouse up leviathan. Let the stars of its twilight be dark. Let it look for , but have none, neither let it see the eyelids of the morning, because it didn't shut up the doors of my mother's , nor did it hide trouble from my eyes. "Why didn't I from the ? Why didn't I give up when my mother bore me? Why did the knees receive me? Or why the breast, that I should nurse? For now I should have lain down and been quiet. I should have slept, then I would have been at rest, with kings and of the earth, who built up waste places for themselves; or with princes who had gold, who filled their houses with silver; or as a hidden untimely birth I had not been, as infants who never saw . There cease from troubling. There the weary are at rest. There the prisoners are at ease together. They don't hear the voice of the taskmaster. The small and the great are there. The servant is free from his master. "Why is given to him who is in misery, life to the bitter in , who long for , but it doesn't come; and dig for it more than for hidden , 22who rejoice exceedingly, and are glad, when they can find the ? Why is given to a man whose way is hidden, whom has hedged in? For my sighing comes before I eat. My groanings are poured out like water. For the thing which I fear comes on me, that which I am afraid of comes to me. I am not at ease, neither am I quiet, neither do I have rest; but trouble comes."
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.