King James Version · The patriarchs
Job 42
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1Then answered , and said, I know that thou canst do every thing, and that no thought can be withholden from thee. Who is he that hideth without knowledge? therefore have I uttered that I understood not; things too wonderful for me, which I knew not. Hear, I beseech thee, and I will speak: I will demand of thee, and declare thou unto me. I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee. Wherefore I abhor myself, and in . And it was so, that after had spoken these words unto , said to the Temanite, My is kindled against thee, and against thy two friends: for ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant hath. Therefore take unto you now seven bullocks and seven rams, and go to my servant , and offer up for yourselves a burnt offering; and my servant shall for you: for him will I accept: lest I deal with you after your folly, in that ye have not spoken of me the thing which is right, like my servant . So the Temanite and the Shuhite and the Naamathite went, and did according as commanded them: also accepted . And turned of , when he for his friends: also gave twice as much as he had before. Then came there unto him all his brethren, and all his sisters, and all they that had been of his acquaintance before, and did eat bread with him in his house: and they bemoaned him, and comforted him over all the evil that had brought upon him: every man also gave him a piece of money, and every one an earring of gold. So the latter end of more than his beginning: for he had fourteen thousand sheep, and six thousand camels, and a thousand of oxen, and a thousand she asses. He had also seven sons and three daughters. 14And he called the name of the first, Jemima; and the name of the second, Kezia; and the name of the third, Keren–happuch. And in all the land were no women found so fair as the daughters of : and their gave them among their brethren. After this lived an hundred and forty years, and saw his sons, and his sons’ sons, even four generations. So , being old and full of days.
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.