King James Version · Egypt and Sinai
Numbers 36
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And the chief fathers of the families of the children of , the son of , the son of , of the families of the , came near, and spake before , and before the princes, the chief fathers of the : And they said, commanded my to give the land for an by lot to the : and my was commanded by to give the of our brother unto his daughters. 3And if they be married to any of the sons of the other tribes of the , then shall their be taken from the of our fathers, and shall be put to the of the tribe whereunto they are received: so shall it be taken from the lot of our . And when the jubile of the shall be, then shall their be put unto the of the tribe whereunto they are received: so shall their be taken away from the of the tribe of our fathers. And commanded the according to the word of , saying, The tribe of the hath said well. This is the thing which doth command concerning the daughters of , saying, Let them marry to whom they think best; only to the family of the tribe of their shall they marry. So shall not the of the remove from tribe to tribe: for every one of the shall keep himself to the of the tribe of his fathers. And every daughter, that possesseth an in any tribe of the , shall be wife unto one of the family of the tribe of her , that the may enjoy every man the of his fathers. 9Neither shall the remove from one tribe to another tribe; but every one of the tribes of the shall keep himself to his own . Even as commanded , so did the daughters of : For , , and , and , and , the daughters of , were married unto their ’s brothers’ sons: 12And they were married into the families of the sons of the son of , and their remained in the tribe of the family of their . These are and , which commanded by the hand of unto the in by Jordan near .
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.