King James Version · Egypt and Sinai
Numbers 13
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1And spake unto , saying, Send thou men, that they may search the land of , which I give unto the : of every tribe of their fathers shall ye send a man, every one a ruler among them. And by the of sent them from of : all those men were heads of the . 4And these were their names: of the tribe of , the son of Zaccur. 5Of the tribe of , the son of . Of the tribe of Judah, the son of . 7Of the tribe of , the son of . Of the tribe of , Oshea the son of . 9Of the tribe of , the son of . 10Of the tribe of , the son of . 11Of the tribe of , namely, of the tribe of , the son of . 12Of the tribe of Dan, the son of Gemalli. 13Of the tribe of Asher, the son of . 14Of the tribe of , the son of . 15Of the tribe of Gad, the son of . These are the names of the men which sent to spy out the land. And called Oshea the son of Jehoshua. And sent them to spy out the land of , and said unto them, Get you up this way southward, and go up into the mountain: And see the land, what it is; and the people that dwelleth therein, whether they be strong or weak, few or many; 19And what the land is that they in, whether it be good or bad; and what cities they be that they in, whether in tents, or in strong holds; And what the land is, whether it be fat or lean, whether there be wood therein, or not. And be ye of good courage, and bring of the fruit of the land. Now the time was the time of the firstripe grapes. So they went up, and searched the land from of unto , as men come to . And they ascended by the south, and came unto ; where , Sheshai, and Talmai, the children of , were. (Now was built seven years before in .) And they came unto the brook of , and cut down from thence a branch with one cluster of grapes, and they it between two upon a ; and they brought of the pomegranates, and of the figs. 24The place was called the brook , because of the cluster of grapes which the cut down from thence. And they returned from searching of the land after forty days. And they went and came to , and to , and to all of the , unto of , to ; and brought back word unto them, and unto all , and shewed them the fruit of the land. And they told him, and said, We came unto the land whither thou sentest us, and surely it floweth with ; and this is the fruit of it. Nevertheless the people be strong that in the land, and the cities are walled, and very great: and moreover we saw the children of there. in the land of the south: and the , and the , and the , in the mountains: and by the sea, and by the coast of Jordan. And stilled the people before , and said, Let us go up at once, and possess it; for we are well able to overcome it. But the men that went up with him said, We be not able to go up against the people; for they are stronger than we. And they brought up an evil report of the land which they had searched unto the , saying, The land, through which we have gone to search it, is a land that eateth up the inhabitants thereof; and all the people that we saw in it are men of a great stature. And there we saw the giants, the sons of , which come of the giants: and we were in our own sight as , and so we were in their sight.
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.