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In Genesis, Abraham pays 400 silver pieces for a field and cave at Machpelah to bury Sarah. Acts recalls this purchase but mixes the narrative with Jacob's land deal at Shechem, crediting Abraham with buying a tomb from the sons of Hamor.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
Genesis 23:16
Hebrew Bible
15 “Hear me, my lord. The land is worth 400 pieces of silver, but what is that between me and you? So bury your dead.” 16 So Abraham agreed to Ephron’s price and weighed out for him the price that Ephron had quoted in the hearing of the sons of Heth—400 pieces of silver, according to the standard measurement at the time. 17 So Abraham secured Ephron’s field in Machpelah, next to Mamre, including the field, the cave that was in it, and all the trees that were in the field and all around its border,
Acts 7:16
New Testament
15 So Jacob went down to Egypt and died there, along with our ancestors, 16 and their bones were later moved to Shechem and placed in the tomb that Abraham had bought for a certain sum of money from the sons of Hamor in Shechem. 17 “But as the time drew near for God to fulfill the promise he had declared to Abraham, the people increased greatly in number in Egypt,
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Notes and References
... Here in Acts it is said that Abraham (not Jacob) bought the land at Shechem from the sons of Hamor, and Shechem (not Machpelah/Hebron) is named as the site of the burial of Jacob. Thus there are two apparent differences from Genesis: (1) the attribution of the purchase of the tomb at Shechem from the sons of Hamor to Abraham instead of Jacob; (2) the burial of Jacob in the same tomb as his sons in Shechem rather than in the cave of Machpelah. With regard to (1), most commentators think that a simple confusion in the names has been made by Stephen (or Luke). However, Bruce (1988: 134n16, 137n35) suggests that Stephen, who earlier ran together the two calls of Abraham in Ur and in Haran and two divine messages in 7:7, here runs together the two accounts of purchases of land in Canaan (it is unlikely that Stephen identified Shechem and Hebron, towns that were over thirty miles apart in separate territories). ...
Marshall, I. Howard
"Acts" in Beale, G. K.; Carson, D. A. (ed.) Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament
(pp. 1316-1318) Baker Academic, 2007
* The use of references are not endorsements of their contents. Please read the entirety of the provided reference(s) to understand the author's full intentions regarding the use of these texts.
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