Sacred History, Volume I: The Old Testament

When Thomas Ellwood (1639–1713) sat down in the last decades of his life to compose his Sacred History, he was already an old hand at the work of making the Scriptures plain. He had been the reader and amanuensis of the blind John Milton; he had suffered imprisonment for his Quaker convictions; and he had spent a lifetime defending, expounding, and living the faith of the early Society of Friends. The Sacred History was the harvest of all of it — a labor to gather the whole biblical narrative “out of the Holy Scriptures, and digest it into due method with respect to order of time and place.”

The Bible is not arranged as a continuous story. Its history is scattered across many books, interrupted by law and genealogy, doubled back upon in Chronicles and the prophets, and often silent about the connections between one episode and the next. Ellwood set himself the task of weaving these threads into a single, readable narrative — harmonizing parallel accounts, supplying chronology, placing the Book of Job in its likely setting among the patriarchs, and pausing throughout to explain a difficult custom, reconcile an apparent discrepancy, or draw a quiet moral. The result is something between a translation, a harmony, and a commentary: the sacred story told as a story, with a learned and devout guide always at the reader’s elbow.

This first volume carries the narrative from the creation of the world to the height of the reign of David — that is, from Genesis through the Second Book of Samuel. Within these chapters the reader will find the primeval history of creation, fall, and flood; the age of the patriarchs and the long, moving story of Joseph in Egypt; the Book of Job, set in the patriarchal age; the deliverance from Egypt and the giving of the law at Sinai; the conquest under Joshua and the cycles of the Judges; and the rise of the monarchy under Samuel, Saul, and David.

This edition is drawn from the clean and carefully corrected text of the 1804 printing and gently modernized for contemporary readers: spelling and punctuation brought into present-day usage, the most archaic forms lightened, and the longest run-on sentences divided for clarity — while Ellwood’s phrasing, his asides, his learned citations, and his unmistakable voice are kept intact. Scripture references have been added and linked to the King James text, and names of persons, places, and peoples linked to encyclopedic articles, so that any reader may turn at once from Ellwood’s retelling to the Scriptures and history behind it.