World English Bible · The patriarchs
Job 9
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1Then answered, "Truly I know that it is so, but how can man be with ? If he is pleased to contend with him, he can't answer him one time in a thousand. is in , and mighty in strength. Who has hardened himself against him and prospered? He removes the mountains, and they don't know it, when he overturns them in his . He shakes the earth out of its place. Its pillars tremble. He commands the sun and it doesn't rise, and seals up the stars. He alone stretches out , and treads on the waves of the sea. He makes the Bear, Orion, and the Pleiades, and the rooms of the south. He does great things past finding out; yes, marvelous things without number. Behold, he goes by me, and I don't see him. He passes on also, but I don't perceive him. Behold, he snatches away. Who can hinder him? Who will ask him, 'What are you doing?' " will not withdraw his . The helpers of stoop under him. How much less will I answer him, and choose my words to argue with him? Though I were , yet I wouldn't answer him. I would make to my judge. If I had called, and he had answered me, yet I wouldn't that he listened to my voice. For he breaks me with a storm, and multiplies my wounds without cause. He will not allow me to catch my breath, but fills me with bitterness. If it is a matter of strength, behold, he is mighty! If of justice, 'Who,' says he, 'will summon me?' Though I am , my own will condemn me. Though I am blameless, it will prove me perverse. I am blameless. I don't respect myself. I despise my life. "It is all the same. Therefore I say he destroys the blameless and . If the scourge kills suddenly, he will mock at the of the innocent. The earth is given into the hand of . He covers the faces of its judges. If not he, then who is it? "Now my days are swifter than a runner. They flee away. They see no good. They have passed away as the swift ships, as the eagle that swoops on the prey. If I say, 'I will forget my complaint, I will put off my sad , and cheer up,' I am afraid of all my sorrows. I know that you will not hold me innocent. I will be condemned. Why then do I labor in ? If I wash myself with snow, and cleanse my hands with lye, yet you will plunge me in the ditch. My own clothes will abhor me. For he is not a man, as I am, that I should answer him, that we should come together in . There is no umpire between us, that might lay his hand on us both. Let him take his away from me. Let his terror not make me afraid; 35then I would speak, and not fear him, for I am not so in myself.
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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.