King James Version · Entering the land
Joshua 20
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also spake unto , saying, Speak to the , saying, Appoint out for you , whereof I spake unto you by the hand of : 3That the slayer that killeth any person unawares and unwittingly may flee thither: and they shall be your refuge from the . And when he that doth flee unto one of those cities shall stand at the entering of the , and shall declare his cause in the ears of the of that city, they shall take him into the city unto them, and give him a place, that he may among them. And if the pursue after him, then they shall not the slayer up into his hand; because he smote his neighbour unwittingly, and hated him not beforetime. And he shall in that city, until he stand before for , and until the of the that shall be in those days: then shall the slayer return, and come unto his own city, and unto his own house, unto the city from whence he fled. And they appointed in in mount , and in mount , and Kirjath–arba, which is , in the mountain of Judah. And on the other side Jordan by eastward, they assigned in upon the plain out of the tribe of , and in out of the tribe of Gad, and Golan in out of the tribe of . These were the cities appointed for all the , and for the that sojourneth among them, that whosoever killeth any person at unawares might flee thither, and not by the hand of the , until he stood before .
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 · Entering the land, 1250 BC to 1200 BC ›
Israel crossing into Canaan and contending with fortified city-states, each with its own king, in a land Egypt had recently dominated and was now losing its grip on.
- The collapse
- The whole eastern Mediterranean is coming apart. Within about fifty years the Hittite empire falls, its capital burns, the Mycenaean palaces are destroyed, Ugarit is wiped out mid-correspondence, and Egypt is fighting for its life against seaborne invaders. Nobody fully knows why. Drought, earthquake, migration, and the failure of interlocking trade are all in the explanation.
- Egypt
- Still strong enough to record a victory over a people called Israel on a stone monument around 1207 BC, the earliest mention of the name outside the Bible. But Egyptian control of Canaan is slipping, and within a generation it is gone.
- Canaan
- Not a country but dozens of walled towns, each with its own king, its own god, and its own quarrel with the next valley. This is why the book of Joshua reads as a list of kings rather than a war with a nation.
- Further afield
- Iron is beginning to replace bronze across the region, partly because the tin trade that made bronze possible has broken down. The Olmec are building San Lorenzo. The Zhou are about to overthrow the Shang in China.