‘And he said, “Brethren and fathers, listen. The God of glory appeared to our father Abraham, when he was in Mesopotamia, before he dwelt in Haran, and said to him, ‘Get you out of your land, and from your kindred, and come into the land which I shall show you.' ” '
Stephen begins his reply in a conciliating way, ‘brethren and fathers'. He is affirming his oneness with them as a Jew, and giving respect to those in authority. Then he asks them to ‘listen', and consider his defence.
He continues his introduction by using a title for God which indicated deep reverence. He calls Him ‘the God of glory'. This idea lay at the heart of Jewish views about God. He was the God of the Shekinah. This phrase would be well known to his hearers and is taken from Psalms 29:3. It stands there in conjunction with an ascription of glory to God which is such that it could only serve to repudiate any charge of dishonouring God. By it he portrays the highest possible view of God. The full context reads (Psalms 29:1-3):
“Ascribe to Yahweh, O you sons of the mighty,
Ascribe to Yahweh glory and strength.
Ascribe to Yahweh the glory due to his name;
Worship Yahweh in holy array.
The voice of Yahweh is on the waters.
The God of glory thunders,
Even Yahweh on many waters.”
No one could doubt there his deep regard for God and His name. Then he moves on to explain what according to his beliefs the God of glory had done.
‘The God of glory appeared to our father Abraham, when he was in Mesopotamia, before he dwelt in Haran, and said to him, ‘Get you out of your land, and from your kindred, and come into the land which I shall show you.' We are probably intended to see the reference to ‘Mesopotamia' (the land between the Rivers), spoken of in Acts 7:4 as ‘the land of the Chaldaeans', as significant. ‘The Chaldaeans' were by this time remembered for their magic and sorcery and mysterious religious practises, and their land had ever been seen as ominously important because it was there that the first godless empire was founded (Genesis 10:9-12) and it was there that they offended God with the tower which was the result of their God-provoking aspirations (Genesis 11:1-9). It was the land of rebellion and of the occult (see Isaiah 47:12-13). Isaiah constantly revealed Babylon as the great blasphemer and anti-God that had had to be destroyed (Isaiah 13:19-20; Isaiah 14:14-20; Isaiah 47:7-15). It was from such a background, says Stephen, that God called out Abraham in His first act of deliverance for His people.
He ‘appeared to Abraham.' This was the first of a number of such theophanies which Abraham would be privileged to enjoy. It was an act of sovereign graciousness, and Stephen is concerned that his hearers remember that when God had appeared to Abraham it was while he was at Babylon, the very centre of all opposition to God. Haran was neighbouring country to Canaan, but it was Mesopotamia that had always been the grim far off enemy (compare Genesis 14:1).
‘When he was in Mesopotamia.' Had we had only the Genesis text to go by, it might not be so apparent that it first happened in Mesopotamia. For while Genesis 12:1 does inform us that God said to Abraham, ‘Get you out of your land, and from your kindred, and come into the land which I shall show you', when examined in the context of Genesis the statement appears to follow the description of the death of Terah in Haran (Genesis 11:32), and to be connected with that (Genesis 12:4) rather than with the departure from Ur.
However, Jewish tradition saw the statement as referring back to Ur, and the connection of the statement with what has gone before is in fact loose, for in Genesis the purpose of the statement in Acts 12:1, which is addressed to Abraham and not to Terah, is more in order to introduce what follows, than to tie in with what has gone before. What went before was simply a general statement of Terah's historical movement from Ur of the Chaldees to Haran, with a view to entering Canaan, an aim which he did not achieve, and the Lord is not portrayed as having said anything about this to Terah who was an idol worshiper (Joshua 24:14). Nevertheless it is quite clear in Genesis that Terah's intention to enter Canaan had been formulated at Ur, and the assumption would be made that God was overall behind it. That is why it is mentioned. No one would therefore doubt that it was then also that God's intention had started for Abraham had started, for they saw God as sovereign over all.
That being so the Jews read Acts 12:1 back to this intention. As Hebrew verbs are not time-specific, reading the opening verb with the equivalent significance of ‘the Lord had said' meant that it was quite possible for it to be seen by Jewish interpreters as quite reasonable to relate the statement to God's continual purpose for Abraham right from the beginning in Ur, and to see it as covering the whole. And that that was how Jews in general did see it is confirmed in both Philo and Josephus.
They therefore argued that God had had a purpose for Abraham from the time of Ur onwards, and thus that the words of God in Acts 12:1 could be applied back to there. Nor can it be doubted that it had been God's purpose in Ur that Abraham should arrive in Canaan. That is something that the writer in Genesis would certainly have agreed was true, as would Stephen's hearers. To them nothing like this could have happened by accident, for in the end God was behind all such decisions. That is why the same idea connecting Abraham's departure with Ur is found in Philo and Josephus, and it was a generally held view among the Jews that God had spoken to Abraham right from the beginning.
Stephen certainly wants us to see that this first break with Babylon came in obedience to God's command and purpose, in readiness for his later reference to Israel's return ‘beyond Babylon' in unbelief (Acts 7:43) which was to be seen as the result of disobedience and rejection of His purpose. There is an intentional comparison between Abraham's obedience in leaving Babylon (expressing the name in other terms in order avoid the stigma attached to the name) and its idolatry, as contrasting right from the start of his speech with Israel's later disobedience in turning to idolatry, which finally resulted in the return to Babylon, and a further comparison between Abraham's willing rejection of Babylon as contrasted with Israel's helpless acceptance of it.