Acts 7:28-29

Acts 7:28-29. Wilt thou kill me, as thou diddest the Egyptian yesterday? Then fled Moses at this saying. De Wette calls attention here to the history of Exodus, which relates how Moses, after his public act of rebellion against the state policy towards the Hebrews, fled from the face of Pharaoh, who was fearfully incensed that one of his own royal house should presume publicly to slay an official in the discharge of his duty, and by so doing signify his extreme disapproval of the policy of the king and his advisers (Exodus 2:15). Stephen, on the other hand, seems to connect the flight of Moses with the rejection of his kinsmen. The two accounts, however, in no way contradict each other. When the act was publicly known, the Pharaoh's court was, of course, no longer a home for the patriot prince who loved his own poor oppressed people better than the splendid future which lay before him if he would only forget his nationality (Hebrews 11:25-26). He was proscribed and disinherited at once, and was obliged to fly from the face of Pharaoh for his life; while the determined and stubborn hostility of the very race for whom he was making so great a sacrifice prevented him from seeking, as he naturally would under the circumstances of his exile have done, a place of concealment among them, where he might have concerted some plan of national deliverance.

In the land of Madian, or Midian. It was a part of Arabia Petraea, and lay along the eastern branch of the Red Sea, the Elanitic Gulf; it reached to the wilderness of Sinai on one side, and the territory of Moab on the other.

Gloag mentions that in some travels in the Middle Ages, there is an account of the ruins of a city called Madian, on the shores of the Elanitic Gulf. The Midianites of Jethro's tribe were perhaps a nomad detachment of the people which wandered in the Arabian desert.