In Stephen’s speech in Acts
7 there are two cases where Acts seems to bear witness to a first-century text
which differed from and which may be superior to the Massoretic text from which
our current versions are translated. Stephen says in Acts 7:4 of Abraham: ‘After
his father died, God removed him from there (Haran) into this land.’ The
Massoretic text of Genesis, however, seems to be self-contradictory in this
matter, for according to Genesis 11:26 and 12:4, his father Terah would have
been 145 years old when Abraham left Haran, whereas Genesis 11:32 says that he
died in Haran at the age of 205. The Samaritan version, however, says that
Terah died at the age of 145. Apparently Luke had the same reading in his text.
If this was in fact the original reading, there was no self-contradiction in
Genesis and no inconsistency between Genesis and Acts.
In Acts 7 :6 Stephen says :
‘his posterity would be aliens in a land belonging to others, who would enslave
them and ill-treat them four hundred years.’ This agrees precisely with Genesis
15:13 and approximately with Exodus 12:40, which says: “The time that the
people of Israel dwelt in Egypt was four hundred and thirty years.’ This is
usually taken to refer to the period from Joseph to the Exodus. Paul, however,
in Galatians 3:17 says that the law ‘came four hundred and thirty years’ after
the covenant with Abraham (which was given three generations before the time of
Joseph). Paul here is in line with rabbinical exegesis which dates the covenant
with Abraham thirty years before Isaac’s birth,’ and includes in the 430 years
the patriarchal sojournings in Canaan and Egypt. Again the Samaritan
Pentateuch, this time supported (though not quite solidly) by the Septuagint
and the Book of Jubilees (second century BC), comes to the rescue, stating
specifically that Israel sojourned in Canaan and Egypt 430 years. If this was
deliberate harmonization, it must antedate the sharp separation between
Samaritans and Jews — in other words its authority is as ancient as the
Massoretic text. That ‘and Canaan’ was accidentally omitted from the Hebrew
text is at least as easy to believe as this. It shows a serious defect in the
textual principles of RV, RSV and NEB that this variant is not even mentioned
in the margin. (John Wenham, Christ and the Bible [The Christian View of
the Bible 1; Surrey: Eagle, 1993], 173-74)
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