Acts 7:1 ¶ Then said the high priest, Are these things so? 2 And he said, Men, brethren, and fathers, hearken; The God of glory appeared unto our father Abraham, when he was in Mesopotamia, before he dwelt in Charran, 3 And said unto him, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and come into the land which I shall shew thee. 4 Then came he out of the land of the Chaldaeans, and dwelt in Charran: and from thence, when his father was dead, he removed him into this land, wherein ye now dwell. 5 And he gave him none inheritance in it, no, not so much as to set his foot on: yet he promised that he would give it to him for a possession, and to his seed after him, when as yet he had no child. 6 And God spake on this wise, That his seed should sojourn in a strange land; and that they should bring them into bondage, and entreat them evil four hundred years. 7 And the nation to whom they shall be in bondage will I judge, said God: and after that shall they come forth, and serve me in this place. 8 And he gave him the covenant of circumcision: and so Abraham begat Isaac, and circumcised him the eighth day; and Isaac begat Jacob; and Jacob begat the twelve patriarchs. 9 And the patriarchs, moved with envy, sold Joseph into Egypt: but God was with him, 10 And delivered him out of all his afflictions, and gave him favour and wisdom in the sight of Pharaoh king of Egypt; and he made him governor over Egypt and all his house. 11 Now there came a dearth over all the land of Egypt and Chanaan, and great affliction: and our fathers found no sustenance. 12 But when Jacob heard that there was corn in Egypt, he sent out our fathers first. 13 And at the second time Joseph was made known to his brethren; and Joseph’s kindred was made known unto Pharaoh. 14 Then sent Joseph, and called his father Jacob to him, and all his kindred, threescore and fifteen souls. 15 So Jacob went down into Egypt, and died, he, and our fathers, 16 And were carried over into Sychem, and laid in the sepulchre that Abraham bought for a sum of money of the sons of Emmor the father of Sychem.
Stephen starts
preaching with Abraham’s calling by God to leave Ur of the Chaldees.
Genesis 11:27
¶ Now these are the generations of
Terah: Terah begat Abram, Nahor, and Haran; and Haran begat Lot. 28 And Haran died before his father Terah in the
land of his nativity, in Ur of the Chaldees. 29
And Abram and Nahor took them wives: the name of Abram’s wife was Sarai;
and the name of Nahor’s wife, Milcah, the daughter of Haran, the father of
Milcah, and the father of Iscah. 30 But
Sarai was barren; she had no child. 31
And Terah took Abram his son, and Lot the son of Haran his son’s son,
and Sarai his daughter in law, his son Abram’s wife; and they went forth with
them from Ur of the Chaldees, to go into the land of Canaan; and they came unto
Haran, and dwelt there. 32 And the days
of Terah were two hundred and five years: and Terah died in Haran.
12:1
¶ Now the LORD had said unto Abram, Get
thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house,
unto a land that I will shew thee: 2 And
I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name
great; and thou shalt be a blessing: 3
And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee:
and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.
4
¶ So Abram departed, as the LORD had
spoken unto him; and Lot went with him: and Abram was seventy and five years
old when he departed out of Haran. 5 And
Abram took Sarai his wife, and Lot his brother’s son, and all their substance
that they had gathered, and the souls that they had gotten in Haran; and they
went forth to go into the land of Canaan; and into the land of Canaan they
came.
Notice the difference
betweens words translated from a Hebrew text and words translated from a Greek
text. For instance, Elijah of Malachi 4:5,6 becomes the Elias of Luke 1:17. So
here, the Haran of Genesis 12:4 becomes the Charran of verse 2.
We discussed the four-hundred-year
timeframe when you and I were going over Genesis. In the comments on Genesis 15:12-16
I noted;
“God
tells Abram that his seed will be servants in a foreign land, which we know to
be Egypt. They will be afflicted for four hundred years and will serve the
people of that land. This is an about, not
an exact 400 years, ten months, 23 days, and two hours type of statement.
Exodus
12:40 Now the sojourning of the children
of Israel, who dwelt in Egypt, was four hundred and thirty years.
And
then, Luke recounting what Stephen said, alluding to what Moses had written
from God’s words;
Acts
7:6 And God spake on this wise, That his
seed should sojourn in a strange land; and that they should bring them into
bondage, and entreat them evil four hundred years.
If
I wrote you a lesson that said, “in the thousand years since the Norman
invasion of England,” and then, in the lesson later wrote, “in the nine hundred
and fifty three years since 1066, when William the Conqueror defeated King
Harold at Hastings,” would that be a contradiction or would you understand what
I said as meaning the same thing?
Here
is Paul referring to this bondage bracketed between the covenant and the giving
of the Law.
Galatians
3:17 And this I say, that the covenant,
that was confirmed before of God in Christ, the law, which was four hundred and
thirty years after, cannot disannul, that it should make the promise of none
effect.
Rabbis
have written that the affliction begins when Ishmael, the offspring of Abram
and Hagar, an Egyptian, begins to persecute Isaac, the son of the promise. They
regarded the four hundred years to start from that point.
God
also tells Abram that four generations will come into being in Egypt before
returning to the land that is promised, The Promised Land of Canaan. For
instance, Levi, Jacob’s son, and his son, Kohath, and his son, Amram, and his son,
Moses. These were four generations that sojourned in Egypt. It is then
important to see that God is talking about two different things; four hundred
years of affliction and four generations in a foreign land.”
In
verse 14 we have the issue about how many people came to Egypt with Jacob. Here
again are my comments from Genesis 46:5-27;
“Verse
15 tells us for that either Dinah wasn’t Jacob’s only daughter or, as said
earlier, the daughters could logically include daughters-in-law. Arguing about
the count becomes nonsensical when we know everyone wasn’t included in the
count of those that mattered to God’s ministry of reconciliation. There are
obviously servants to consider, as well, which are not mentioned.
We
also come to differences in the count given for different reasons at different
times.
Exodus
1:5 And all the souls that came out of
the loins of Jacob were seventy souls: for Joseph was in Egypt already.
Deuteronomy
10:22 Thy fathers went down into Egypt
with threescore and ten persons; and now the LORD thy God hath made thee as the
stars of heaven for multitude.
Acts
7:14 Then sent Joseph, and called his
father Jacob to him, and all his kindred, threescore and fifteen souls.
Some
argue about these differences with fundamentalists trying to gloss over what
they fear naggingly in the back of their minds is an error in the text.
However, the problem is with the modern reader who is infected with a mental
problem I call modernism. You read the Bible like you would read the owner’s
manual for your car rather than as you would read a letter sent to you from
afar, in this case a distant time, a personal account of something dear to the
writer. The Holy Ghost, through the wisdom and understanding, the meaning of
Biblical inspiration which is not word-for-word dictation, given to Moses,
refers to events from the perspective of their importance to the point He is
trying to get across (see Job 32:8; 2Peter 3:15). In one reference He may
include wives who are not included in another or He may be referring to an
event from another angle and only include specific others. The modern
fundamentalist who claims to believe the Bible literally, which they don’t
really, in their attempts to explain by juggling numbers what the Bible says,
is really expressing their own disbelief and lack of faith by trying to explain
a contradiction that isn’t there.
I
went over this kind of thinking when I was discussing years, back in my
comments on 15:12-16, regarding the length of years that the Hebrews were to be
persecuted. The point is all of the number references are correct and any
differences can be explained by the Holy Ghost counting people in one who are
not counted in another. We will find this again in the numbers who will die in
a plague later in another book. Verses 26 and 27 warn us that our calculations
may not be based on God’s calculations which will keep the doubter or the
skeptic spinning his or her wheels trying to find an equation that will make
him or her feel better.”
Again
we see translation differences as Emmor and Sychem transliterated from Greek
were Hamor and Shechem from Hebrew in Genesis 33:19.
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