King James Version · Egypt and Sinai
Numbers 25
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And Israel abode in , and the people began to commit whoredom with the daughters of . And they called the people unto the of their gods: and the people did eat, and to their gods. And Israel joined himself unto : and the of was kindled against Israel. And said unto , Take all the heads of the people, and hang them up before against the sun, that the of may be turned away from Israel. And said unto the judges of Israel, ye every one his men that were joined unto . And, behold, one of the came and brought unto his brethren a Midianitish woman in the sight of , and in the sight of all of the , who were weeping before the door of the of . And when , the son of , the son of the priest, saw it, he rose up from among , and took a javelin in his hand; And he went after the man of Israel into the tent, and thrust both of them through, the man of Israel, and the woman through her belly. So the plague was stayed from the . And those that in the plague were twenty and four thousand. 10And spake unto , saying, , the son of , the son of the priest, hath turned my away from the , while he was for my sake among them, that I consumed not the in my . Wherefore say, Behold, I give unto him my of peace: And he shall have it, and after him, even of an priesthood; because he was for his , and made an atonement for the . Now the name of the that was slain, even that was slain with the Midianitish woman, was Zimri, the son of Salu, a prince of a chief house among the . And the name of the Midianitish woman that was slain was Cozbi, the daughter of Zur; he was head over a people, and of a chief house in . 16And spake unto , saying, Vex , and smite them: For they vex you with their wiles, wherewith they have beguiled you in the matter of , and in the matter of Cozbi, the daughter of a prince of , their sister, which was slain in the day of the plague for ’s sake.
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.