King James Version · Egypt and Sinai
Numbers 17
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1And spake unto , saying, Speak unto the , and take of every one of them a according to the house of their fathers, of all their princes according to the house of their fathers twelve : write thou every man’s name upon his . And thou shalt write ’s name upon the of : for one shall be for the head of the house of their fathers. And thou shalt lay them up in the of before the , where I will meet with you. And it shall come to pass, that the man’s , whom I shall choose, shall blossom: and I will make to cease from me the murmurings of the , whereby they murmur against you. 6And spake unto the , and every one of their princes gave him a apiece, for each prince one, according to their fathers’ houses, even twelve : and the of was among their . And laid up the before in the of . And it came to pass, that on the morrow went into the of ; and, behold, the of for the was budded, and brought forth buds, and bloomed blossoms, and yielded almonds. 9And brought out all the from before unto all the : and they looked, and took every man his . And said unto , Bring ’s again before the , to be kept for a token against the rebels; and thou shalt quite take away their murmurings from me, that they not. 11And did so: as commanded him, so did he. And the spake unto , saying, Behold, we , we , we all . Whosoever cometh any thing near unto the of shall : shall we be consumed with dying?
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.