Acts 7:14

μετεκαλέσατο : four times in Acts, and nowhere else in N.T., cf. Acts 10:32; Acts 20:17; Acts 24:25, only once in LXX, H. and R., cf. Hosea 11:2, A; so εἰσκαλέομαι, only once in N.T., cf. Acts 10:23; not in LXX or Apocrypha. Both compounds are peculiar to St. Luke in N.T., and are frequent in medical writers, to “send for” or to “call in” (although Polyb. in middle voice, Acts 22:5; Acts 22:2, in same sense) a physician, Hobart, Medical Language, etc., p. 219. In Attic Greek we should have μεταπέμπεσθαι. ἐν ψυχαῖς ἑβδομήκοντα πέντε : ἐν = Hebrew בְּ, cf. Deuteronomy 10:22, in (consisting in) so many souls, cf. Luke 16:31. Here in Deut., LXX, as also in Hebrew, we have the number given as seventy (although in A, seventy-five, which seems to have been introduced to make the passage similar to the two others quoted below) who went down into Egypt. But in Genesis 46:27, and in Exodus 1:5, LXX, the number is given as seventy-five (the Hebrew in both passages however giving seventy as the number, although in Genesis 46:26 giving sixty-six, making up the seventy by adding Jacob, Joseph, and his two sons). For the curious Rabbinical traditions current on the subject, see Lumby, Acts, p. 163. In Genesis 46:27 the LXX make up the number to seventy-five by adding nine sons as born to Joseph while in Egypt, so that from this interpolation it seems that they did not obtain their number by simply adding the sons and grandsons, five in all, of Ephraim and Manasseh from Genesis 46:20 (LXX) to the seventy mentioned in the Hebrew text, as Wetstein and others have maintained. But there is nothing strange in the fact that Stephen, as a Hellenist, should follow the tradition which he found in the LXX. Josephus in Ant., ii., 7, 4; vi., 5, 6, follows the Hebrew seventy, and Philo gives the two numbers, and allegorises about them. See Meyer-Wendt, p. 174, note, Hackett, Lumby, in loco, and Wetstein. Nothing in the argument is touched by these variations in the numbers.