Charles Ellicott Commentary Acts 13:20

"and after these things he gave [them] judges until Samuel the prophet." — Acts 13:20 (ASV)

After that he gave unto them judges . . .—The statement in the text, assigning 450 years to the period of the judges, and apparently calculating that period from the distribution of the conquered territory, differs from that in 1 Kings 6:1, which gives 480 years as the period between the Exodus and the building of the temple.

The better manuscripts, however, give a different reading: He gave their land to them as an inheritance, about 450 years, and after these things he gave unto them judges. The 450 years in this case are referred to the interval between the choice of "our fathers," which may be calculated from the birth of Isaac (B.C. 1897 according to the received chronology) to the distribution of the conquered country in B.C. 1444.

Regarding any significant discrepancy, this is a sufficient explanation, but what was said before about the general tendency in a discourse of this kind to use round numbers must also be remembered (see Note on Acts 7:6). Josephus (Antiquities 8.3.1) gives 592 years from the Exodus to the building of Solomon’s Temple. Of this period, sixty-five years were occupied by the wanderings in the wilderness and the conquest under Joshua, and eighty-four by the reigns of Saul and David and the first four years of Solomon, leaving 443 years for the period of the Judges. This, it will be seen, agrees sufficiently with the Received Text in this passage but leaves the discrepancy with 1 Kings 6:1 unexplained. There would, of course, be nothing strange in Saint Paul following the same traditional chronology as Josephus, even where it differed from that of the present Hebrew text of the Old Testament.