Acts7chapter 7

Acts 7:1-2

The high priest asks only, are these things so, giving Stephen the floor to answer the charge of blasphemy against Moses and the temple. Stephen opens with courtesy, men, brethren, and fathers, hearken, and begins not with a defense but with a recital of Israel's own history, starting with the God of glory who appeared unto our father Abraham while he was still in Mesopotamia, before he dwelt in Charran. The bench notes that a man accused of despising Moses and the fathers chooses to speak of nothing else for the whole of his answer.

Acts 7:3-4

Stephen quotes the call, get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and come into the land which I shall shew thee, then places it before the move to Charran rather than after, and adds that Abraham left Charran only when his father was dead. Genesis names Terah's age at death as two hundred five and Abraham's departure at seventy-five, arithmetic that some readings resolve by counting Terah's years from an earlier son's birth rather than from Abraham's own, and others by supposing Abraham left while Terah still lived on in Charran without Scripture's full chronology being Stephen's concern. The bench holds both resolutions open, since the speech's aim is the pattern of a promise kept while its holder is still a landless sojourner, not a chronicle of dates.

Acts 7:5

God gave Abraham none inheritance in it, no, not so much as to set his foot on, yet promised to give it to him for a possession, and to his seed after him, when as yet he had no child. Stephen's point, the bench agrees, is that the promise outran every visible evidence for it, land without a foothold and offspring without a son, faith answering a word rather than a circumstance. The same reading Hebrews eleven gives Abraham's whole life is compressed here into a single verse.

Acts 7:6-7

God foretold that Abraham's seed should sojourn in a strange land and be brought into bondage and evil entreaty four hundred years, then added, the nation to whom they shall be in bondage will I judge, and after that shall they come forth, and serve me in this place. Stephen quotes Genesis fifteen closely, and the bench notes the round number four hundred sits beside Exodus twelve's four hundred thirty without contradiction, the shorter figure a common rounding of the longer span from promise to exodus. The phrase serve me in this place points first to Sinai, where the law and the tabernacle Stephen is about to describe were given, before it ever points to Canaan.

Acts 7:8

the covenant of circumcision: God gave Abraham the covenant of circumcision, and so Abraham begat Isaac and circumcised him the eighth day, and the line runs on through Isaac to Jacob and Jacob to the twelve patriarchs. Stephen moves through four generations in a single verse, the pace of the speech quickening as it approaches the story his hearers know best. The bench reads the covenant sign named here as the visible mark of the very promise just described as still unseen in verse five.

Acts 7:9-10

The patriarchs, moved with envy, sold Joseph into Egypt, but God was with him, delivered him out of all his afflictions, and made him governor over Egypt and all his house. The bench reads Joseph as the speech's first figure of the pattern Stephen is building toward, a man his own brothers rejected whom God exalted to be the very one who saves them. Joseph's envy at the hands of his own kindred rhymes with the envy Stephen's own hearers now hold toward him.

Acts 7:11-14

A dearth over all the land of Egypt and Chanaan sends Jacob's sons down for corn, and at the second visit Joseph is made known to his brethren and sends for his father Jacob and all his kindred, numbered here as threescore and fifteen souls. Genesis counts seventy in the Hebrew text while the Greek Septuagint Stephen and his hearers both knew counts seventy five, the extra five drawn from Joseph's grandsons through Ephraim and Manasseh named in that version's fuller genealogy. The bench treats the number as evidence of which text Stephen is using rather than any error, a detail that fits a speech otherwise saturated in Old Testament language.

Acts 7:15-16

Jacob went down into Egypt, and died, he and our fathers, and were carried over into Sychem, and laid in the sepulchre that Abraham bought of the sons of Emmor. Genesis records Jacob buried at Machpelah near Hebron, a field Abraham bought from Ephron the Hittite, while Joshua records Joseph's bones buried at Shechem in ground Jacob himself had purchased from Hamor, so Stephen's single verse appears to compress two burials and two purchases into one. The bench names the standard readings honestly, a summary that assumes the hearers know both accounts, or the sons of Jacob generally buried at the family's ancestral sites, without pressing either as settled.

Acts 7:17-19

As the time of the promise drew nigh, the people grew and multiplied in Egypt till another king arose, which knew not Joseph, a change of dynasty the bench reads as marking Egypt's turn from favor to fear of the very people it once welcomed. This king deals subtilly with Israel and evil entreats their fathers, so that they cast out their young children, to the end they might not live, the infanticide that opens Exodus one. Multiplication under Joseph's honor gives way to multiplication under a stranger's dread, the same growth now read as threat rather than blessing.

Acts 7:20-22

Moses was born, and was exceeding fair, and after Pharaoh's daughter takes him up and nourishes him for her own son, he is learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and was mighty in words and in deeds. Stephen's detail of an Egyptian education goes beyond what Exodus states outright, drawing on a tradition of Moses's upbringing that Josephus and Philo both record at greater length in the century around this speech. The bench reads mighty in words and in deeds as preparing Moses's whole later career, against the man who will later call himself slow of speech in Exodus four.

Acts 7:23-25

When he was full forty years old, Moses visits his brethren, sees one suffer wrong, and smites the Egyptian, supposing his brethren would have understood how that God by his hand would deliver them, but they understood not. The bench reads this as Moses's own premature attempt at deliverance, forty years ahead of God's timing, acting rightly in defending the oppressed but wrongly in the manner and moment he chose. Stephen's aside, he supposed, but they understood not, sets up the deeper charge the speech is building, that Israel has a long history of failing to recognize its own deliverers when they first come.

Acts 7:26-29

The next day Moses shewed himself unto them as they strove and tried to reconcile two Hebrews, only to be rebuffed, who made thee a ruler and a judge over us, wilt thou kill me, as thou diddest the Egyptian yesterday. The rejection drives him into exile in the land of Madian, a stranger for the second time, first from Egypt's court and now from his own people. The bench names this the first of three explicit rejections the speech will trace, Moses refused here just as the patriarchs sold Joseph and as this very council will soon deliver up Jesus.

Acts 7:30-34

After forty years an angel of the Lord in a flame of fire in a bush appears to Moses in the wilderness of mount Sina, and the voice that follows speaks in the first person, I am the God of thy fathers, put off thy shoes from thy feet, and I have seen, I have seen the affliction of my people. The speaker is named the angel of the Lord yet speaks as God himself without distinction, a pattern many readers across church history take as a preincarnate appearance of the Son, while others read it as an angel commissioned to speak God's own words in his name, and the text does not settle which. Either reading agrees that the ground is made holy by the presence that meets Moses there, not by anything in the ground itself.

Acts 7:35-37

This Moses whom they refused, saying, who made thee a ruler and a judge, the same did God send to be a ruler and a deliverer by the hand of the angel which appeared to him in the bush. Stephen presses the pattern into words, the very man Israel rejected is the man God had already appointed to save them, and he closes the point by quoting Moses's own prophecy, a prophet shall the Lord your God raise up unto you of your brethren, like unto me, him shall ye hear. That prophecy, already cited in Peter's temple sermon in chapter three, is read by the church as fulfilled in Christ, the prophet greater than Moses whom this same council has just refused to hear.

Acts 7:38-41

Stephen calls Israel gathered at Sinai the church in the wilderness, the same word ekklesia the New Testament uses for its own assembly, tying the covenant people under Moses to the covenant people under Christ as one continuous story rather than two. That congregation received the lively oracles to give unto us, yet would not obey, but thrust him from them, and in their hearts turned back again into Egypt, making a calf and rejoicing in the works of their own hands. The bench reads the golden calf as the pattern's low point, a people who had just heard God's own voice turning within weeks to worship what their hands had made.

Acts 7:42-43

God turned, and gave them up to worship the host of heaven, and Stephen quotes Amos, ye took up the tabernacle of Moloch, and the star of your god Remphan, figures which ye made to worship them, and I will carry you away beyond Babylon. He follows the Greek Septuagint's Remphan where the Hebrew of Amos five names the god Kaiwan, a rendering difference the bench treats as translation rather than a different accusation, both pointing to star worship borrowed from Mesopotamia. Amos names exile beyond Damascus while Stephen, quoting the Greek text, says beyond Babylon, the later and larger exile his own hearers' own history had already fulfilled.

Acts 7:44-46

Our fathers had the tabernacle of witness in the wilderness, made according to the fashion Moses had seen, and it was brought in with Jesus, meaning Joshua, who bears the same name in Greek, into the possession of the Gentiles God drave out before their fathers, until the days of David. David found favour before God and desired to find a tabernacle for the God of Jacob, a longing 2 Samuel seven records God answering not with a house David builds but with a house God promises to build for him. The bench flags the name Jesus here as Joshua throughout, a translation point worth naming so no reader mistakes the conqueror of Canaan for the Lord Stephen is about to name.

Acts 7:47-50

Solomon built him an house, yet Stephen immediately quotes Isaiah, howbeit the most High dwelleth not in temples made with hands, heaven is my throne, and earth is my footstool, what house will ye build me, hath not my hand made all these things. The bench reads this not as an attack on the temple's legitimacy but as the temple's own prophets correcting any confidence that God's presence could be confined inside it, the exact charge Stephen was falsely accused of inventing in chapter six now shown to be Isaiah's own words. The council that prized the temple above the man now hears the temple's own Scripture set above the building.

Acts 7:51-53

Stephen turns the recital into direct address, ye stiffnecked and uncircumcised in heart and ears, ye do always resist the Holy Ghost, as your fathers did, so do ye, language drawn from Moses's own rebuke of Israel in Exodus and Deuteronomy rather than invented against them. His charge, which of the prophets have not your fathers persecuted, and they have slain them which shewed before of the coming of the Just One, of whom ye have been now the betrayers and murderers, is a prophet's indictment spoken from within Israel's own story, the same form Isaiah and Jeremiah used against the leaders of their own day. The charge falls on this council and that generation's rulers by name, in the very words their own Scriptures had already used of unfaithful leadership, and is not read by the bench as a verdict on the Jewish people as a whole.

Acts 7:54

The council is cut to the heart, and they gnashed on him with their teeth, the same phrase that described the earlier rage in chapter five now rising to something closer to a mob's fury than a court's deliberation. Chrysostom reads the gnashing as the sign that argument has already failed and only violence remains to a council that cannot answer Stephen's history with history of its own. Nothing in the text suggests any legal sentence follows what comes next.

Acts 7:55-56

Full of the Holy Ghost, Stephen looks up stedfastly into heaven and sees the glory of God, and Jesus standing on the right hand of God, an image he announces aloud, behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of man standing on the right hand of God. Every other reference to Christ's position after the ascension has him seated, and the bench names the readings offered for why he stands here, some seeing Christ risen to receive his first martyr as a host rises to welcome a guest, others seeing him standing as an advocate testifying on Stephen's behalf before the very council that has just condemned him. Both readings honor Stephen's own use of the title Son of man, the title Jesus used of himself before this same council in Luke's Gospel.

Acts 7:57-58

They cry out with a loud voice, stopped their ears, and ran upon him with one accord, then cast him out of the city and stone him, an execution the council had no Roman authority to carry out lawfully, the same limit that had forced the leaders to bring Jesus before Pilate rather than kill him themselves. The witnesses, required by the law to cast the first stones, lay down their clothes at a young man's feet, whose name was Saul, the book's first mention of the man who becomes its central figure after chapter nine. The bench notes the quiet weight of that single naming, a persecutor introduced at the edge of the very death he is consenting to.

Acts 7:59-60

Lord Jesus, receive my spirit: Stephen calls upon God, saying, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit, then kneels and cries with a loud voice, Lord, lay not this sin to their charge, and when he had said this, he fell asleep. The bench hears both prayers echoing Christ's own words from the cross, father, into thy hands I commend my spirit, and father, forgive them, for they know not what they do, the first martyr dying in the pattern of his Lord. Luke's closing word, fell asleep, is the New Testament's own name for a believer's death, a rest rather than an end.