Biblion Bible Commentary
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Joseph: rejected by his brothers, sent ahead to save them
Acts 7:9-16
9 “The patriarchs, moved with jealousy against Joseph, sold him into Egypt. God was with him · WEB
The first of the speech's two great rejections: the patriarchs sold the man God was using to save them, and did not recognize him until the second visit.
The patriarchs, moved with jealousy against Joseph, sold him into Egypt. The sentence is placed without softening, and the noun is doing the work. These are the patriarchs — the founding fathers of the twelve tribes, the men whose names the court's own ancestry runs through. Stephen's history is not flattering, and it is not inventing anything; every hearer knew the story and had perhaps never heard it stated so bluntly.
The motive named is jealousy. It is the same word used three chapters earlier for the high priest's reason for arresting the apostles, and the repetition is unlikely to be accidental in a speech delivered to that high priest.
What God does with the crime is stated in a phrase that becomes the pattern of the whole address: God was with him. Not with the brothers who stayed home in the land of promise. With the one they had removed. God's presence follows the rejected man into a foreign country and works there — which is, again, the temple question in another form.
The deliverance runs through the rejection rather than around it. Joseph is afflicted, delivered, given favor and wisdom before Pharaoh, and made governor. Then famine arrives and the brothers who sold him must come to the man they sold in order to eat. Stephen notes the detail that will matter later: On the second time Joseph was made known to his brothers. On the first visit they did not know him. Recognition required a second approach.
That is the shape Stephen will impose on Moses in the next paragraph and, by clear implication, on the case in front of the court. God sends a deliverer; his own people fail to recognize him and get rid of him; he is exalted elsewhere; and on the second encounter he is known and is the only source of rescue available. Nobody in the room needed the application spelled out, and Stephen does not spell it out.
The closing verses gather the family into Egypt and then carry the bodies home. Two details in them have long been discussed. The number who went down is given as seventy-five, which is what the Greek Old Testament reads at that point; the Hebrew text reads seventy Genesis 46:27. And the burial is placed at Shechem in a tomb bought from the sons of Hamor, whereas Abraham's purchase recorded in Genesis is the field at Machpelah, and the Shechem plot was Jacob's Genesis 23:16–17 Genesis 33:19.
The honest description is that a speaker summarizing two thousand years under interrogation has compressed two purchases and two burial sites into one clause. What the passage records with complete accuracy is what Stephen said; the compression is his, in a speech delivered from memory in a capital trial, and it touches nothing his argument depends on. His subject is not conveyancing. It is that the fathers buried in that land had died holding a promise they never saw kept.
held with reason What this mark means