Acts 7:4

Then came he out of the land of the Chaldaeans, and dwelt in Charran: and from thence, when his father was dead, he removed him into this land, wherein ye now dwell.

Then came he out of the land of the Chaldeans, and dwelt in Charran: and from thence, when his father was dead, he removed him into this land, wherein ye now dwell. This last statement seems to contradict the account given in ; ; and , from which one would certainly conclude that Abraham's father, instead of being dead when he migrated to Canaan, lived 60 years after that. (Thus, "Terah lived, sixty years and beget Abram, Nahor, and Haran;" "And the days of Terah were two hundred and five years, and Terah died in Haran;" "And Abram was seventy and five years old when he departed out of Haran." Adding, then, to Terah's 70 years, when Abram was born-and supposing him to be the oldest of the family-the 75 years of Abram's age, when-he removed to Canaan, we have Terah only 145 years old at that date, leaving 60 years more of his life to run after that).

This difficulty has occasioned much discussion and diversity of opinion. Grotius, DeWette, and Meyer have an easy way of disposing of the matter by alleging a chronological error on the part of Stephen. But as Philo has represented the matter very much as Stephen does, Lechler and others prefer to say that he simply followed the current tradition; and Alford endeavours to account for the Jews having fallen into this mistake. But let us see how others solve the difficulty. Olshausen and Stier, following the rabbis, have adopted a most unnatural interpretation-namely, that when Abraham's removal to Canaan is said to have been 'after his father's death,' it means not his natural but big spiritual death, or his apostasy to idolatry (). A more natural solution is, that when it is said "Terah was seventy years old, and beget Abram, Nahor, and Haran" (), the meaning is that he was seventy when the oldest of his three sons was born, and that Abraham, though mentioned before Nabor and Haran, as being the most important of the three, was probably the youngest.

'This (says Alexander, who takes this view) would enable us to fix the birth of Abraham at such a distance from that of his older brother or brothers as would bring his 75th year after the natural death of his father.' 'But this (says Olshausen, and with reason, we suspect) will not fill up 60 years.' Better than this, in our judgment, is Bengel's view (though pronounced by Lechler 'purely fanciful,' and by Alford 'lamentable'), that though Abraham came to Canaan while has father was alive, it was only as a stranger-his settled abode being then with his father at Haran-and that it was only on his father's demise that Abraham permanently settled in Canaan. This would account for the Jewish tradition on the subject, and quits well explain in Stephen's statement. But it hardly accord's with the natural sense of the account given in Genesis. It only remains to state the view taken by Baumgarten, which seems best to meet the difficulty-that in Genesis the historian relates at once, in the eleventh chapter, all he has to say of the ancestry and nearest relations of Abraham, ending with the death of his father, in order that when he came to open in the next chapter the more special history of the father of the faithful, he might be able to relate his call and migration to Canaan as the proper starting-point of the covenant transactions, unembarrassed by any reference to his fleshly connections, and that Stephen, reading the history in this light (as, indeed, Philo seems to have done, and so, probably, other also), holds forth the calling of Abraham as being after his father's death. If this be the case, instead of this being properly a chronological error, it is simply the light in which the original account, as it stands in Genesis, naturally presents itself to the devout mind. The reader, however having thus before him all the different views of the matter, can judge for himself.