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
between 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 seven 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 Genesis 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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