Acts 13:20

If we follow the best attested reading, see critical notes, we may connect the dative of time ἔτεσι, cf. Acts 8:11, closely with the preceding words as signifying the period within which an event is accomplished. The κληρονομία was already assured to the fathers as God's chosen, Acts 7:5, and the four hundred years of the people's sojourn in a strange land, Acts 7:6; Genesis 15:13, forty years in the wilderness, and some ten years for the actual conquest of the land made up the four hundred and fifty years (so Weiss, Felten, see Wendt, in loco). If reading in T.R. is accepted (strongly defended by Farrar, St. Paul, i., p. 370), although it is at variance with 1 Kings 6:1, according to which Solomon began his Temple in the 480th (LXX 440th) year after the Exodus, we have merely to suppose that the Apostle followed the popular chronology adopted by Josephus, Ant., viii., 3, 1; x., 8, 5, especially when we remember that speaking in round numbers (ὡς) that chronology tallies very fairly with that of the Book of Judges. See Meyer-Wendt, Alford, and cf. also the almost similar reckoning in Wetstein, and Bethge, Die Paulinischen Reden, pp. 30, 31. Another explanation is given by Rendall, in loco, where ἔτεσι is taken as marking not duration of time (which would require the accusative), but the limit of time within which, etc.