The narratives of the Hebrew Bible are notorious for providing few details, the kind that later generations of readers would take for granted. This is especially true for character details, such as internal motives, histories, and cultural backgrounds.1 Later readers and interpreters treated these gaps as opportunities to add these details, especially those that provide teaching moments centered on key characters. This literary behavior is known as midrash, the practice of interpreting scripture by retelling and expanding it with details the written account leaves unsaid.
Aggadah (sometimes spelled Haggadah) is the narrative side of midrash, elaborating and building the stories themselves, while halakhah is the legal side, settling questions of how to interpret the Torah and live.2 Retellings of this kind were common in Jewish writing from the centuries before and around the time of Jesus, before later Rabbinic traditions would formalize and popularize their use.3 Stephen’s long speech in Acts retells Israel’s story from Abraham through Moses and the temple, with several details not found in the Hebrew Bible that follow Jewish story expansions in use both before and after Acts was written. The speech draws on the same kind of aggadic tradition other Jewish storytellers used when they retold scripture with material the written Hebrew narrative does not supply.4
Accordingly he speedily learnt arithmetic, and geometry, and the whole science of rhythm and harmony and metre, and the whole of music, by means of the use of musical instruments, and by lectures on the different arts, and by explanations of each topic; and lessons on these subjects were given him by Egyptian philosophers, who also taught him the philosophy which is contained in symbols, which they exhibit in those sacred characters of hieroglyphics, as they are called, and also that philosophy which is conversant about that respect which they pay to animals which they invest with the honours due to God. And all the other branches of the encyclical education he learnt from Greeks; and the philosophers from the adjacent countries taught him Assyrian literature and the knowledge of the heavenly bodies so much studied by the Chaldaeans. (Philo, On the Life of Moses 1.23)
The early life of Moses is one of the most notorious silences in the Hebrew Bible, as it represents a void in one of the central characters in the Torah. Philo’s biography of Moses represents an attempt to fill this void, providing a full education for Moses the Hebrew Bible never describes. Exodus says Pharaoh’s daughter took Moses as her son and later that he went out to his own people, with nothing about teachers, subjects, or Egyptian learning of any kind. In On the Life of Moses, Egyptian teachers instruct him in calculation, geometry, music, symbolic reading, and the honor paid to animals, while Greeks and neighboring peoples add further subjects to a schooling Exodus never mentions.
and when he had been abandoned, Pharaoh’s daughter adopted him and brought him up as her own son. So Moses was trained in all the wisdom of the Egyptians and was powerful in his words and deeds. (Acts 7:21-22)5
In Acts, Stephen states the same non-biblical claim more directly, placing Moses’ training in all the wisdom of the Egyptians immediately after his adoption. Nothing in the Hebrew text of Exodus provides any of this detail, yet Philo and Acts both include his education, with Philo going into far more detail and Acts compressing it into a single summary. Other Jewish retellings handle this gap differently, as when Jubilees describes Amram as the one who taught Moses to write, which makes Egyptian court education one tradition among several attempts to explain Moses’ early life.6
So Moses was trained in all the wisdom of the Egyptians and was powerful in his words and deeds. But when he was about forty years old, it entered his mind to visit his fellow countrymen the Israelites. When he saw one of them being hurt unfairly, Moses came to his defense and avenged the person who was mistreated by striking down the Egyptian. (Acts 7:22-24)
Here, Moses is said to be about forty years old when he first visits his people, a number the Hebrew Bible never states, since Exodus says only that he had “grown up” when he went out to his brothers. Later in the same speech, forty years pass in Midian before the burning bush, followed by forty years of wilderness leadership after the exodus. Deuteronomy records that Moses died at one hundred twenty, with Exodus putting him at eighty when he confronted Pharaoh, yet nowhere does the Hebrew narrative lay out his life as three equal blocks of forty years, a scheme Acts constructs more from tradition than text.7 The same division appears in a Rabbinic collection compiled centuries afterward.
“Joseph resided in Egypt, he, and his father’s household; Joseph lived one hundred and ten years” (Genesis 50:22). “Joseph resided in Egypt…” – there are six pairs whose years were equal: Rebecca and Kehat, Levi and Amram, Joseph and Joshua, Samuel and Solomon, Moses and Hillel the elder, Rabbi Yoḥanan ben Zakkai and Rabbi Akiva. Moses spent forty years in Pharaoh’s palace, forty years in Midyan, and he served Israel for forty years. Rabbi Yoḥanan ben Zakkai engaged in commerce for forty years, studied Torah for forty years, and served Israel for forty years. Rabbi Akiva was an ignoramus for forty years, studied Torah for forty years, and served Israel for forty years. (Genesis Rabbah 100:10)8
Rabbinic tradition in Genesis Rabbah places Moses forty years in Pharaoh’s palace, forty in Midian, and forty serving Israel, equating that pattern with the careers of later teachers. Coming much later than Acts, the collection points to a shared aggadic timeline current well beyond either text, one both sources treat as ordinary story detail though the Hebrew Bible never supplies it. A related count of Moses’ years in Jubilees differs slightly, which suggests this specific tradition circulated in more than one form.9
The Lord will appear in the sight of all, and all will know that I am the God of Israel, the father of all Jacob’s children, and the king on Mt. Zion for the ages of eternity. Then Zion and Jerusalem will become holy.” The angel of the presence, who was going along in front of the Israelite camp, took the tablets which told of the divisions of the years from the time the law and the testimony were created — for the weeks of their jubilees, year by year in their full number, and their jubilees from the time of the creation until the time of the new creation when the heavens, the earth, and all their creatures will be renewed like the powers of the sky and like all the creatures of the earth, until the time when the temple of the Lord will be created in Jerusalem on Mt. Zion. All the luminaries will be renewed for the purposes of healing, health, and blessing for all the elect ones of Israel and so that it may remain this way from that time throughout all the days of the earth. (Jubilees 1:28-29)
Jubilees opens with the angel of the presence taking the tablets that set out the divisions of the years from the creation of the Torah and the testimony. In the Sinai narrative in the Hebrew Bible, God speaks and Moses mediates, with no angel delivering the Torah to Israel in this way. The angel’s role here is part of how Israel receives the Torah and its calendar, following a very common tradition that developed much later in the Second Temple period, adding an angelic figure at the center of an exchange.10
“You stubborn people, with uncircumcised hearts and ears! You are always resisting the Holy Spirit, like your ancestors did! Which of the prophets did your ancestors not persecute? They killed those who foretold long ago the coming of the Righteous One, whose betrayers and murderers you have now become! You received the law by decrees given by angels, but you did not obey it.” (Acts 7:51-53)11
Stephen’s closing charge likewise describes receiving the Torah by decrees given by angels, following this tradition which is not found in the Hebrew Bible. Josephus reports something similar in a speech attributed to Herod, where the rules of the Torah are said to have been delivered by angels, while Galatians and Hebrews connect angels with the giving of the Torah in the same way.12 Stephen’s speech incorporates traditions and details found nowhere in the Hebrew Bible, retelling scripture with the same basic methodology that Philo, Jubilees, Josephus, and Rabbinic tradition used. The New Testament belongs here to a common Jewish practice of filling out the biblical story with aggadic material drawn from living tradition.
Alter, Robert. The Art of Biblical Narrative (p. 211) Basic Books, 2011
Brown, Raymond E. The Birth of the Messiah: A Commentary on the Infancy Narratives (pp. 559-560) Doubleday, 1993; Stern, David. “Midrash and Parables in the New Testament,” in The Jewish Annotated New Testament, ed. Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler (p. 594) Oxford University Press, 2017
Kugel, James L. The Bible as It Was (pp. 1-36) Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1997
Whitenton, Michael R. “Rewriting Abraham and Joseph: Stephen’s Speech (Acts 7:2–16) and Jewish Exegetical Traditions,” Novum Testamentum 54.2 (pp. 149-167) Brill, 2012
Assmann, Jan. Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (p. 10) Harvard University Press, 1997; Johnson, Luke Timothy. Septuagintal Midrash in the Speeches of Acts (pp. 27-28) Marquette University Press, 2002; Enns, Peter. Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament (pp. 174-175) Baker Academic, 2005
Keener, Craig S. Acts: An Exegetical Commentary, Vol. 2 (pp. 1389-1390) Baker Academic, 2013
VanderKam, James C. Jubilees 2: A Commentary on the Book of Jubilees Chapters 22-50 (pp. 1144-1145) Fortress Press, 2018
Docherty, Susan E. The Jewish Pseudepigrapha: An Introduction to the Literature of the Second Temple Period (p. 36) Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2014; Enns, Peter. Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament (pp. 175-177) Baker Academic, 2005; Keener, Craig S. Acts: An Exegetical Commentary, Vol. 2 (p. 1404) Baker Academic, 2013
Tuschling, R.M.M. Angels and Orthodoxy (p. 69) Mohr Siebeck, 2007