King James Version · Egypt and Sinai
Numbers 19
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1And spake unto and unto , saying, This is the of which hath commanded, saying, Speak unto the , that they bring thee a red heifer without spot, wherein is no , and upon which never came : And ye shall give her unto the priest, that he may bring her forth without the camp, and one shall her before : And the priest shall take of her with his finger, and sprinkle of her directly before the of seven times: And one shall burn the heifer in his sight; her skin, and her , and her , with her dung, shall he burn: And the priest shall take cedar wood, and , and scarlet, and cast it into the midst of the burning of the heifer. Then the priest shall wash his clothes, and he shall bathe his in water, and afterward he shall come into the camp, and the priest shall be until the even. 8And he that burneth her shall wash his clothes in water, and bathe his in water, and shall be until the even. And a man that is clean shall gather up the of the heifer, and lay them up without the camp in a clean place, and it shall be kept for of the for a water of separation: it is a purification for . And he that gathereth the of the heifer shall wash his clothes, and be until the even: and it shall be unto the , and unto the that sojourneth among them, for a for ever. He that toucheth body of any man shall be seven days. He shall purify himself with it on the third day, and on the seventh day he shall be clean: but if he purify not himself the third day, then the seventh day he shall not be clean. Whosoever toucheth body of any man that is , and purifieth not himself, defileth the of ; and that from Israel: because the water of separation was not sprinkled upon him, he shall be ; his uncleanness is yet upon him. 14This is , when a man dieth in a tent: all that come into the tent, and all that is in the tent, shall be seven days. And every open , which hath no covering bound upon it, is . And whosoever toucheth one that is slain with a in the open fields, or a body, or a bone of a man, or a , shall be seven days. And for an person they shall take of the of the burnt heifer of purification for , and running water shall be put thereto in a : And a clean person shall take , and dip it in the water, and sprinkle it upon the tent, and upon all the vessels, and upon the persons that were there, and upon him that touched a bone, or one slain, or one , or a : And the clean person shall sprinkle upon the on the third day, and on the seventh day: and on the seventh day he shall purify himself, and wash his clothes, and bathe himself in water, and shall be clean at even. But the man that shall be , and shall not purify himself, that from among , because he hath defiled of : the water of separation hath not been sprinkled upon him; he is . And it shall be a perpetual unto them, that he that sprinkleth the water of separation shall wash his clothes; and he that toucheth the water of separation shall be until even. And whatsoever the person toucheth shall be ; and the that toucheth it shall be until even.
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.