Acts 7:23

ὡς δὲ ἐπληροῦτο … χρόνος. Render, but when he was well-nigh forty years old. The verb intimates that the forty years were just being completed. For the fixing of this time we have no authority in the Old Testament. We learn thence that Moses was eighty years old when he was sent to speak before Pharaoh for the deliverance of the Israelites (Exodus 7:7), and that he was a hundred and twenty years old when he died (Deuteronomy 34:7). In Midrash Tanchuma on Exodus 2:6, we are told ‘Moses was in the palace of Pharaoh twenty years, but some say forty years, and forty years in Midian, and forty years in the wilderness.’ Stephen’s words agree with this tradition, which no doubt was known in his day to every Jew.

ἀνέβη ἐπὶ τὴν καρδίαν. The phrase is not classical, but is found in the LXX. frequently, as 2 Kings 12:4; Isaiah 65:16; Jeremiah 3:16 and Ezekiel 38:10, ἐν τῇ ἡμέρᾳ ἐκείνῃ�, ‘in that day shall things come into thy heart.’

ἐπισκέψασθαι, to visit. The same verb is used in Luke 7:16, ‘God hath visited His people,’ and means to look upon generally with kindness (cf. ἐπισκέπτεσθαι, James 1:27), and this is the old sense of the English visit. See Shaksp. Rich. II. I. 3. 275:

‘All places that the eye of heaven visits.’