Bible Difficulties (85 page)

We therefore conclude that
both totals
are correct, though they were calculated differently. Jacob's own sons numbered twelve; his grandsons by them numbered fifty-two; there were already four great-grandsons born in Canaan by the time of the migration, for a total of sixty-six. Manasseh and Ephraim, born in Egypt, increased the total to sixty-eight; Jacob and his wife (whichever she was) brought it up to seventy. But the Septuagint added the seven grandsons of the prime minister and omitted Jacob and his wife from the tally.

This brings us to the result that Stephen correctly reported the number seventy-five, according to the Septuagint in Genesis 46:27 and Exodus 1:5. Likewise, Genesis 46:27, Exodus 1:5, and Deuteronomy 10:22 in the Masoretic text are correct with their total of seventy. Either figure is correct, depending on whether Joseph's grandchildren are included. (Four great-grandchildren of Jacob were included even in the Masoretic text tally of seventy.)

Wasn't Stephen mistaken about Jacob's plot of land at Shechem as having been
bought by Abraham?

In his address to the Sanhedrin in Acts 7, Stephen said, concerning the interment of the bodies of Jacob's sons, "Their bodies were brought back [from Egypt] to Shechem and placed in the tomb that Abraham had bought from the sons of Hamor at Shechem for a certain sum of money" (v.16). In this entire discourse Stephen evidences a thorough knowledge of the Old Testament. How could he have been ignorant of Joshua 24:32, which indicates that the coffin of Joseph was finally laid to rest in a plot of ground that

"Jacob had bought from the sons of Hamor." At first glance it looks as if we have a clear contradiction between these two statements. Yet there is a good possibility that what Jacob did when he made that purchase was to obtain once again for his family that which had originally been bought by Abraham.

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Quite similar is the case of the well of Beersheba. Originally that well was dug by Abraham's workmen, and he paid for the rights to that property by offering seven lambs to Abimelech, king of Gerar (Gen. 21:27-30). But later on, owing to the nomadic habits of Abraham and his family, the property rights he had legally acquired became ignored; and the tract on which the well was located fell back into the possession of the local inhabitants. It was not until many years later that Isaac, having reopened the well to care for his livestock, found it expedient to secure the ownership by paying for it once more, rather than to assert his legal title to it by means of a range war. He therefore gave an oath of friendship and nonaggression to King Abimelech (probably a son or grandson of the same name as the Abimelech with whom Abraham had dealt many years before) and held a covenant-sealing sacrifice and banquet (Gen. 26:28-31) with him. Here then was a case where both Abraham and his descendant purchased the same ground.

In the case of Shechem, this was the very first location at which Abraham stopped after his migration from Haran, and there he erected his first altar to Yahweh in the Land of Promise (Gen. 12:6-7). There God appeared to him in a vision and confirmed His promise of the land to Abram and his descendants. Under these circumstances it was altogether logical for him to purchase the tract around the Oak of Moreh, where the altar had been erected. Stephen was undoubtedly aware of a reliable oral tradition that Abraham had in fact done so, even though the written record of the Old Testament had omitted this transaction.

In later years, long after Abraham had moved south and Isaac had made Beersheba his headquarters, and after Jacob's twenty-one years in Padan-Aram, the ancestral claim Jacob had to Abraham's plot was quite forgotten by the inhabitants of Shechem. Or else they may have felt that the house of Abraham had really forfeited their rights through the long period of disuse, thereby allowing some local family to take it over and work the land as their own.

When Jacob finally showed up and had settled down in the region of Shechem for an extensive sojourn (until the massacre connected with the rape of Dinah), it was only natural for him to negotiate for the repurchase of Abraham's tract. Genesis 33:18-20 tells how he paid one hundred
qesitah
(a unit of weight in excess of a shekel; the apparently cognate Arabic term
qasitatun
, an ancient unit of weight, came to 1,429 grams or 3.15

pounds). It is this sum that is later recalled in Joshua 24:32. (The only other place where
qesitah
is mentioned in the Old Testament is Job 42:11, where it is the amount given to Job by each of his relatives, to help him get started in business again after his recovery from illness.) Undoubtedly this was a much larger price than was originally paid by Abraham, and so it was only natural for Jacob's transaction to be regarded as the firmer basis for Israelite ownership of this land.

One final observation is in order concerning the "tomb" (
mnema
) Abraham had bought from the sons of Emmor in Shechem. The Old Testament makes no mention of a tomb at Shechem until the burial of Joseph there. Nor does it mention Abraham's buying a tomb anywhere at all--not even when he wanted to bury Sarah in the cave of Machpelah in Hebron. He simply wanted to buy the cave so that he could afterward prepare it as a final 388

resting place for her body. There could have been no confusion in Stephen's mind as to the true location of the resting place Abraham had purchased for Sarah and for himself.

Everyone knew that it was the cave of Machpelah, and that Hebron was the city to which that belonged.

We concluded, therefore, that the reference to a
mnema
("tomb") in connection with Shechem must either have been proleptic for the later use of that Shechemite tract for Joseph's tomb (i.e., "the tomb that Abraham bought" was intended to imply "the tomb location that Abraham bought"); or else conceivably the dative relative pronoun
ho
was intended elliptically for
en to topo ho onesato Abraam
("in the place that Abraham bought") as describing the location of the
mnema
near the Oak of Moreh right outside Shechem. Normally Greek would have used the relative-locative adverb
hou
to express

"in which" or "where"; but this would have left
onesato
("bought") without an object in its own clause, and so
ho
was much more suitable in this context.

Did not Stephen err in his quotation of Amos 5:26 (Rephan instead of Chiun)?

In Acts 7:43 Stephen quotes Amos 5:26 as referring to a certain idol carried by some of the Israelites of Moses' day in a clandestine cultic practice: "And you took up the tabernacle of Moloch, and the star of the god Rompha." But the Hebrew text reads: "And you carried the booth [or else
sikkut
may represent the name of a heathen god
Sakkut
, an epithet of the Sumerian god NIN-IB] of your king [or your `king-god'; but Melek may be vowel-pointed as Molek or Molok, which is the way the Septuagint took it] and the shrine of your idols [although
kiyyun
is a noun found nowhere else in the Old Testament, and may here be intended as the name of a heathen god rather than being a common noun derived from the root
kun
, "establish, set in place"). The Septuagint reads almost the same as Acts 7:43, except that it has "the star of
your
god
Raiphan
." In other words,
kiyyun
is rendered "star," and the spelling
Raiphan
appears instead of
Rompha
. Let us take up each of these variants in order.

First of all,
sikkut
has a very dubious base as a common noun for "shrine." As indicated above, it more probably should be vowel pointed as
Sakkut
(so Millar Burrows, cited in Koehler-Baumgartner,
Lexicon
, p. 657; cf. E. Schrader, cited in Eissfeldt,
The Old
Testament
, p. 507, n.5), an epithet of the star god NIN-IB, which was vocalized as
Ninurta
(Rene Labat,
Manuel d' epigraphie Akkadienne
[Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1948], p. 535); the god of tempest, hunting, and war, and a deity associated with the star Sirius (E. Dhorne,
Les Religions de Babylonie et d' Assyrie
[Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1945], p. 81). Hence the rendition
astron
("star") is appropriate for
Sakkut
, and Stephen quite properly followed the Septuagint at this point.

Second, the Nestle reading (25th ed.) of
Rompha
is based only on Codex Vaticanus; Sinaiticus reads
Romphan
; Beza and the Latin versions favor Rempham. But the reading
Raiphan
, which follows the Septuagint, is supported by the third-century A.D. Bodmer text and the Codex Alexandrinus, and is favored by the
Rephan
of Ephjraimi Rescriptus and the Codex Laudianus; hence it is adopted into the text by the United Bible Societies'

edition (Aland, Black, Martini, Metzger, Wikgren) of the Greek NT (also Nestle's 26th 389

ed.). We take it, therefore, that
Raiphan
was the original spelling employed by Stephen (assuming that he addressed the Sanhedrin in Greek--it could have been in Aramaic perhaps, but Stephen seems to follow the Septuagint quite consistently in his quotations from the Old Testament).

If
Raiphan
is the correct reading, we may assume that Stephen used it as it appeared in the Septuagint, which was at that time the only authoritative Greek translation in general use. There was no need at that juncture for him to discuss the earlier spelling of the word back in Amos's text, for it would have served no useful purpose. But it is important to observe that the Septuagint translators may have misread this strange, foreign deity's name because of confusion in regard to similar appearing letters. During the fifth century B.C., in the Elephantine Papyri composed by a colony of Jews in southern Egypt, the form of the letter kaph (K) was written like an Arabic "7" with a straight stem, which resembles the shape of resh (R), which also looks like an Arabic "7" with a straight stem.

Also, the letter waw (W), which was written like a question mark tilted to the right without the dot, was very similar to the letter pe (P), which also was written like a question mark tilted to the right without the dot. Therefore what was written in the Hebrew
Vorlage
as K-Y-W-N might have been misread as R-Y-P-N, which would then be vocalized as
Raipan
or
Raiphan
. In other words
kywn
was copied out as
rypn
.

In a consonantal script like Hebrew, the vowels were only a matter of guesswork in the case of foreign names--though, of course, an accurate oral tradition might have preserved the correct vocalization. In the case of the names of foreign gods, however, the Hebrews had an aversion to pronouncing their names aloud; this militated against any kind of accuracy in the oral tradition of a heathen deity's name. In actuality, the vocalization of the name in the Amos text was probably
kaywan
rather than
kiyyun
(as the Masoretes have vocalized it). By this devious route, then, the original
kaywan
of Amos ended up as
Raiphan
on the lips of Stephen in Acts 7:43.

Did Paul's companions hear the Voice on the Damascus Road?

An apparent contradiction arises between the first account of Paul's conversion on the Damascus Road (Acts 9:7) and the second account (Acts 22:9) in regard to Paul's companions. Did they hear the Voice from heaven or did they not? Acts 9:7 states: "But the men who were journeying with Paul were standing speechless, hearing the Voice (
akouontes men tes phones
), but beholding no one." In Acts 22:9, on the other hand, we are told, "And those who were with me beheld the light, but they did not hear the Voice

[
ten de phonen ouk ekousan
] of the one who was talking to me."

In the original Greek, however, there is no real contradiction between these two statements. Greek makes a distinction between hearing a sound as a noise (in which case the verb "to hear" takes the genitive case) and hearing a voice as a thought-conveying message (in which case it takes the accusative). Therefore, as we put the two statements together, we find that Paul's companions heard the Voice as a sound (somewhat like the crowd who heard the sound of the Father talking to the Son in John 12:28, but perceived it only as thunder); but they did not (like Paul) hear the message that it articulated. Paul 390

alone heard it intelligibly (Acts 9:4 says Paul
ekousen phonen
--accusative case); though he, of course, perceived it also as a startling sound at first (Acts 22:7: "I fell to the ground and heard a voice [
ekousa phones
] saying to me," NASB). But in neither account is it stated that his companions ever heard that Voice in the accusative case.

There is an instructive parallel here between the inability to hear the voice as an articulated message and their inability to see the glory of the risen Lord as anything but a blaze of light. Acts 22:9 says that they saw the light, but Acts 9:7 makes it clear that they did not see the Person who displayed Himself in that light. There is a clear analogy between these differing levels of perception in each case.

(For the technical case-distinction in Greek, cf. W. W. Goodwin and C. B. Gulick,
Greek Grammar
[Boston: Ginn & Co., 1930], #1103: "The partitive genitive is used with verbs signifying to taste, to smell, to hear, to perceive, etc."--with the example from Aristophanes'
Pax: phones akouein moi doko
--`Methinks I hear a voice." See also #1104:

"Verbs of hearing, learning, etc. may take an accusative of the thing heard etc., and a genitive of the person heard from." This comes very close to the distinction made above, that the accusative indicates the voice as a communicated message or thought, rather than as simply a sound vibrating against the eardrum.)

How long was Paul's ministry at Ephesus, two years or three?

Acts 19:10 states that Paul's teaching at the school of Tyrannus went on for two years, so that all in the province of Asia heard the gospel. But in his charge to the Ephesian elders, as recorded in Acts 20:31, Paul says, "Therefore be on the alert, remembering that night and day for a period of three years I did not cease to admonish each one with tears"