World English Bible · Entering the land
Joshua 20
Touch any underlined name to see who or where it is. Tap a verse number to see where it is taken up elsewhere.
spoke to , saying, "Speak to the , saying, 'Assign the , of which I spoke to you by , 3that the man slayer who kills any person accidentally or unintentionally may flee there. They shall be to you for a refuge from the . He shall flee to one of those cities, and shall stand at the entrance of the , and declare his case in the ears of the of that city. They shall take him into the city with them, and give him a place, that he may live among them. If the pursues him, then they shall not up the man slayer into his hand; because he struck his neighbor unintentionally, and didn't hate him before. He shall in that city until he stands before for , until the of the that shall be in those days. Then the man slayer shall return, and come to his own city, and to his own house, to the city he fled from.'" They in in the hill country of , in the hill country of , and (also called ) in the hill country of Judah. Beyond at eastward, they assigned in in the plain out of the tribe of , in out of the tribe of Gad, and Golan in out of the tribe of . These were the appointed cities for all the , and for who lives among them, that whoever kills any person unintentionally might flee there, and not by the hand of the , until he stands before .
A public domain modern English translation, free to read and share. 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.