World English Bible · The patriarchs
Job 42
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1Then answered : "I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be restrained. You asked, 'Who is this who hides without knowledge?' therefore I have uttered that which I didn't understand, things too wonderful for me, which I didn't know. You said, 'Listen, now, and I will speak; I will question you, and you will answer me.' I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you. Therefore I abhor myself, and in ." It was so, that after had spoken these words to , said to the Temanite, "My is kindled against you, and against your two friends; for you have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant has. Now therefore, take to yourselves seven bulls and seven rams, and go to my servant , and offer up for yourselves a burnt offering; and my servant shall for you, for I will accept him, that I not deal with you according to your folly. For you have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant has." So the Temanite and the Shuhite and the Naamathite went and did what commanded them, and accepted . restored prosperity when he for his friends. gave twice as much as he had before. Then all his brothers, all his sisters, and all those who had been of his acquaintance before, came to him and ate bread with him in his house. They comforted him, and consoled him concerning all the evil that had brought on him. Everyone also gave him a piece of money, and everyone a ring of gold. So the latter end of more than his beginning. He had fourteen thousand sheep, six thousand camels, one thousand of oxen, and a thousand female donkeys. He had also seven sons and three daughters. 14He called the name of the first, Jemimah; and the name of the second, Keziah; and the name of the third, Keren Happuch. In all the land were no women found so beautiful as the daughters of . Their gave them an among their brothers. After this lived one hundred forty years, and saw his sons, and his sons' sons, to four generations. So , being old and full of days.
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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.