King James Version · Egypt and Sinai
Leviticus 24
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1And spake unto , saying, Command the , that they bring unto thee pure oil olive beaten for , to cause the lamps to burn continually. 3Without the vail of the , in the of , shall order it from the evening unto the morning before continually: it shall be a for ever in your generations. He shall order the lamps upon the pure candlestick before continually. And thou shalt take , and bake twelve cakes thereof: two tenth deals shall be in one cake. And thou shalt set them in two rows, six on a row, upon the pure table before . And thou shalt put pure upon each row, that it may be on the bread for a memorial, even an made by unto . Every he shall set it in order before continually, being taken from the by an . And it shall be ’s and his sons’; and they shall eat it in the place: for it is most unto him of the of made by by a perpetual . And the son of an Israelitish woman, whose was an , went out among the : and this son of the Israelitish woman and a man of Israel strove together in the camp; And the Israelitish woman’s son blasphemed the name of , and . And they brought him unto : (and his mother’s name was Shelomith, the daughter of Dibri, of the tribe of Dan:) And they put him in ward, that of might be shewed them. 13And spake unto , saying, Bring forth him that hath without the camp; and let all that heard him lay their hands upon his head, and let all stone him. And thou shalt speak unto the , saying, Whosoever curseth his shall bear his . And he that blasphemeth the name of , he shall surely be put to , and all shall certainly stone him: as well the , as he that is born in the land, when he blasphemeth the name of , shall be put to . And he that killeth any man shall surely be put to . And he that killeth a beast shall make it good; beast for beast. And if a man cause a in his neighbour; as he hath done, so shall it be done to him; Breach for breach, eye for eye, tooth for tooth: as he hath caused a in a man, so shall it be done to him again. And he that killeth a beast, he shall restore it: and he that killeth a man, he shall be put to . Ye shall have one manner of law, as well for the , as for one of your own country: for I am your . And spake to the , that they should bring forth him that had out of the camp, and stone him with stones. And the did as commanded .
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.