Acts 7:51

Acts 7:51. Ye stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears. Thus far had Stephen pursued his great argument calmly and without passion, though, as one great division of the history after the other passed before him in review, his style became more fervid, and the reproachful allusions less and less veiled. He had brought down the story of the people to the period of the establishment of the Temple worship and the reign of Solomon, and his view now ranged over a long and gloomy time, when new idolatry, ever more and more repulsive, was constantly being introduced among the people; when the prophets of the Lord were rejected, hunted down, and often murdered; when all spiritual life seemed gradually to have withered away, and to have been replaced, even after the bitter punishment of captivity and exile, only by a barren and selfish formalism; and this long dark avenue of sin and ingratitude was closed by the cross on Mount Calvary, with the figure of the Just One nailed upon it. It was this terrible memory of the last long Chapter s of the story he was telling, it was the thought above all of the crucifixion of the Just, which filled the soul of Stephen with holy indignation, which found vent in this torrent of rebuke and anger against his guilty judges: the bitter words of reproach which he used were well-known ones, and the imagery was familiar to every Jew.

Compare among many passages Deuteronomy 9:6; Deuteronomy 10:16; Deuteronomy 10:16; Exodus 33:3-5; Nehemiah 9:16. We gather from the traditional history of the nation, that the wickedness of the children of Israel during the period, the contemplation of which roused so fierce a storm of righteous anger in Stephen's heart, was of a darker hue even than that described in the ‘kings' and ‘prophecies.' Both the Bible history and the traditions were well known to Stephen. Some of these latter were embodied in the Talmud, where, for instance, we read a saying of one of the last monarchs of Israel, Jehoiakim the son of Josiah, in whose time Jeremiah lived. ‘ My predecessors,' scornfully boasted the impious king, ‘ did not know how to provoke God' (from the Babylonian Talmud, ‘Sanhedrim,' sec. II, quoted in the Yad of Maimonides).