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Chapter 12

Abram’s Call and Migration. The Lord said to Abram: Go forth[a] from your land, your relatives, and from your father’s house to a land that I will show you.(A)

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Footnotes

  1. 12:1–3 Go forth…find blessing in you: the syntax of the Hebrew suggests that the blessings promised to Abraham are contingent on his going to Canaan.

(A)And he replied,[a] “My brothers and fathers, listen. The God of glory appeared to our father Abraham while he was in Mesopotamia,[b] before he had settled in Haran, and said to him, ‘Go forth from your land and [from] your kinsfolk to the land that I will show you.’(B) So he went forth from the land of the Chaldeans and settled in Haran. And from there, after his father died, he made him migrate to this land where you now dwell.(C)

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Footnotes

  1. 7:2–53 Stephen’s speech represents Luke’s description of Christianity’s break from its Jewish matrix. Two motifs become prominent in the speech: (1) Israel’s reaction to God’s chosen leaders in the past reveals that the people have consistently rejected them; and (2) Israel has misunderstood God’s choice of the Jerusalem temple as the place where he is to be worshiped.
  2. 7:2 God…appeared to our father Abraham…in Mesopotamia: the first of a number of minor discrepancies between the data of the Old Testament and the data of Stephen’s discourse. According to Gn 12:1, God first spoke to Abraham in Haran. The main discrepancies are these: in Acts 7:16 it is said that Jacob was buried in Shechem, whereas Gn 50:13 says he was buried at Hebron; in the same verse it is said that the tomb was purchased by Abraham, but in Gn 33:19 and Jos 24:32 the purchase is attributed to Jacob himself.