The tabernacle of witness. — The word was applied by the LXX. to the Tabernacle, as in Numbers 9:15; Numbers 17:7, as containing the Two Tables of Stone, which were emphatically the testimony of what was God’s will as the rule of man’s conduct (Exodus 25:16; Exodus 25:21; Exodus 31:18). It should be noted that the LXX. gives the same rendering for the words which the English version translates as the “tabernacle of the congregation,” e.g., in Exodus 29:10; Exodus 33:7; Numbers 16:18-19.
As he had appointed, speaking unto Moses. — The answer to the charge lay in these words. Stephen admitted and asserted the divine sanction that had been given to Tabernacle and Temple. What he denied was that that sanction involved perpetuity. It is not without interest to note in the thought thus implied the germ of Hooker’s great argument in the Third Book of his Ecclesiastical Polity (c. 11).