King James Version · Egypt and Sinai
Leviticus 12
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1And spake unto , saying, Speak unto the , saying, If a woman have conceived , and born a man child: then she shall be seven days; according to the days of the separation for her infirmity shall she be . And in the eighth day of his foreskin shall be . And she shall then continue in of her purifying three and thirty days; she shall touch no hallowed thing, nor come into , until the days of her purifying be fulfilled. But if she bear a maid child, then she shall be two weeks, as in her separation: and she shall continue in of her purifying threescore and six days. And when the days of her purifying are fulfilled, for a son, or for a daughter, she shall bring of the first year for a , and a young pigeon, or a turtledove, for a , unto the door of the of , unto the priest: Who shall offer it before , and make an atonement for her; and she shall be cleansed from the issue of her . This is for her that hath born a male or a female. And if she be not able to bring , then she shall bring two turtles, or two ; the one for the , and the other for a : and the priest shall make an atonement for her, and she shall be clean.
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 · Egypt and Sinai, 1450 BC to 1200 BC ›
Israel in and then out of Egypt, at a period when Egypt was an imperial power that also controlled Canaan. The nation is formed as a people with a law before it has any land.
- Egypt
- The New Kingdom at its imperial peak, with a professional army, a chariot corps, and control reaching up through Canaan. Ramesses II reigns for sixty-six years and covers the country in monuments to himself. Egyptian power in this period is the reason Canaan is garrisoned rather than free.
- The Hittites
- The other superpower, in what is now Turkey, and Egypt's rival for the Levant. The two fight the largest chariot battle of the ancient world at Kadesh, then sign a treaty whose text survives from both sides. Hittite treaty form, with its historical prologue, stipulations, witnesses, blessings, and curses, is the shape the Sinai covenant takes, which is one of the stronger arguments for the antiquity of that material.
- The Aegean
- Mycenaean Greece: warrior kings in stone citadels at Mycenae and Pylos, keeping palace accounts in Linear B. The world of the Trojan War stories, whatever lies behind them.
- Further afield
- The Shang dynasty in China is casting extraordinary bronzes and writing questions to its ancestors on ox bones. In Mesoamerica the Olmec are beginning the first civilisation of the Americas.