King James Version · The patriarchs
Job 35
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1 spake moreover, and said, Thinkest thou this to be right, that thou saidst, My is more than ’s? For thou saidst, What advantage will it be unto thee? and, What profit shall I have, if I be cleansed from my ? I will answer thee, and thy companions with thee. Look unto , and see; and behold the clouds which are higher than thou. If thou sinnest, what doest thou against him? or if thy be multiplied, what doest thou unto him? If thou be , what givest thou him? or what receiveth he of thine hand? Thy wickedness may hurt a man as thou art; and thy may profit . By reason of of oppressions they make the oppressed to cry: they cry out by reason of the arm of the mighty. But none saith, Where is my maker, who giveth songs in the night; Who teacheth us more than the of the earth, and maketh us wiser than the fowls of ? There they cry, but none giveth answer, because of the pride of evil men. Surely will not hear , neither will regard it. Although thou sayest thou shalt not see him, yet is before him; therefore thou in him. But now, because it is not so, he hath visited in his ; yet he knoweth it not in great extremity: Therefore doth open his in ; he multiplieth words without knowledge.
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.