World English Bible · The patriarchs
Job 35
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1Moreover answered, "Do you think this to be your right, or do you say, 'My is more than ,' that you ask, 'What advantage will it be to you? What profit will I have, more than if I had ?' I will answer you, and your companions with you. Look to the skies, and see. See the skies, which are higher than you. If you have , what effect do you have against him? If your are multiplied, what do you do to him? If you are , what do you give him? Or what does he receive from your hand? Your wickedness may hurt a man as you are, and your may profit a . "By reason of of oppressions they cry out. They cry for help by reason of the arm of the mighty. But no one says, 'Where is my Maker, who gives songs in the night, who teaches us more than the animals of the earth, and makes us wiser than the birds of ?' There they cry, but no one answers, because of the pride of evil men. Surely will not hear an empty cry, neither will regard it. How much less when you say you don't see him. The cause is before him, and you wait for him! But now, because he has not visited in his , neither does he greatly regard arrogance, therefore opens his with empty talk, and he multiplies words without knowledge."
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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.