Charles Ellicott Commentary Acts 7:2

"And he said, Brethren and fathers, hearken: The God of glory appeared unto our father Abraham, when he was in Mesopotamia, before he dwelt in Haran," — Acts 7:2 (ASV)

Men, brethren, and fathers.—The discourse that follows presents many aspects, each of special interest:

1. It is clearly an unfinished fragment, interrupted by the clamours of the bystanders (Acts 7:51)—the torso, as it were, of a great apologia. Its very incompleteness, the difficulty of tracing the argument as far as it goes because we do not see how far it was meant to go, are indirect proofs that we have a true, though not necessarily a verbatim, report.

   A later writer, composing a speech after the manner of Herodotus and Thucydides, would have made it a much more direct answer to the charges in the indictment. And this, in its turn, supplies a reasonable presumption in favor of other speeches reported by the same author.

2. Looking to the relations between St. Luke and St. Paul, and to the prominence of the latter among the accusers of Stephen, there is a strong probability that the report was derived from him. This is confirmed by some instances of remarkable parallelism between the speech and his later teaching (Compare to Acts 7:53, Galatians 3:19; Acts 7:48, Acts 17:24).

3. The speech is the first great survey of the history of Israel as a process of divine education—the first development from the lips of a human teacher of principles that had previously been latent. As such, it contains the germs that were, in their turn, to be afterwards developed, on the one hand, by St. Paul in the Epistles known to be his, and on the other hand by Apollos, or whoever was the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews.

4. The speech is also remarkable as bringing together within a comparatively small compass a considerable number of real or apparent inaccuracies in the details of the history that is commented on. Whether they are real or apparent will be discussed as we deal with each of them.

   It is obvious that the results thus arrived at will form something like a crucial test of theories that men have formed as to the nature and limits of inspiration.

5. As Stephen was a Hellenistic or Greek-speaking Jew, it is probable that the speech was delivered in Greek. To that extent, it confirms the inference that has been drawn from the Aramaic words specially recorded in our Lord’s teaching—“Ephphatha,” “Talitha cumi,” and the cry upon the cross—that He habitually used the former language, and that this was the medium of intercourse between the priests and Pilate (See Notes on Mark 5:41; Mark 7:34).

The God of glory.—The opening words are an implied answer to the charge of blaspheming God. The name contained an allusive reference to the Shechinah, or cloud of glory, which was the symbol of the Presence of Jehovah. That was the “glory of the Lord.” He, in like manner, was the “Lord of glory” .

Before he dwelt in Charran.—We come, at the very outset, on one of the difficulties above referred to. Here the call of Abraham is spoken of as before he sojourned in Haran, or Charran, west of the Euphrates. In Genesis 12:1 it is first mentioned after Abraham’s removal there. On the other hand, Genesis 15:7 speaks of God as bringing him from Ur of the Chaldees—i.e., from Mesopotamia, or the east of the Euphrates; and this is confirmed by Joshua 24:3, Nehemiah 9:7.

The language of writers contemporary with Stephen (Philo, De Abrah.; Jos. Ant. i. 7, § 1) lays stress, as he does, on the first call as well as the second. Here, accordingly, it cannot be said that the statement is at variance with the Old Testament narrative. The word Mesopotamia was used by the LXX, and has from there passed into later versions, for the Hebrew Aram-Naharaim, “Syria of the two rivers” (Genesis 24:10; Deuteronomy 23:4; Judges 3:8), and, less accurately, for Padan-Aram in Genesis 25:20; Genesis 28:2; Genesis 28:5–6; where our version retains the Hebrew name.