World English Bible · Egypt and Sinai
Numbers 25
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Israel stayed in ; and the people began to play the with the daughters of ; for they called the people to the of their gods. The people ate and to their gods. Israel joined himself to , and burned against Israel. said to , "Take all the chiefs of the people, and hang them up to before the sun, that the of may turn away from Israel." said to the judges of Israel, "Everyone kill his men who have joined themselves to ." Behold, one of the came and brought to his brothers a woman in the sight of , and in the sight of all of the , while they were weeping at the door of the . When , the son of , the son of the priest, saw it, he rose up from the middle of , and took a spear in his hand. He went after the man of Israel into the pavilion, and thrust both of them through, the man of Israel, and the woman through her body. So the plague was stopped among the . Those who by the plague were twenty-four thousand. 10 spoke to , saying, ", the son of , the son of the priest, has turned my away from the , in that he was with my among them, so that I didn't consume the in my . Therefore say, 'Behold, I give to him my of peace. It shall be to him, and to his after him, of an priesthood, because he was his , and made atonement for the .'" Now the name of the man of Israel that was slain, who was slain with the woman, was Zimri, the son of Salu, a prince of a fathers' house among the . The name of the woman who was slain was Cozbi, the daughter of Zur. He was head of the people of a fathers' house in . 16 spoke to , saying, "Harass , and strike them; for they harassed you with their wiles, wherein they have deceived you in the matter of , and in the incident regarding Cozbi, the daughter of the prince of , their sister, who was slain on the day of the plague in the matter of ."
A public domain modern English translation, free to read and share. 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.