Acts 7:6-48

⁶“ Later God told Abraham, ‘Your descendants will go and live in a foreign country. They will live there for four hundred years, and during that time their leaders will mistreat your descendants and force them to work as slaves.’

⁷But God also said, ‘I will punish the people who make them work as slaves. Then, after that, your descendants will leave that land and they will come and worship me in this land.’ ”

⁸“Then God commanded Abraham that every male in his household and all of his male descendants should be circumcised to show that they all belonged to God and that they would obey what he had told Abraham to do. Later Abraham's son, Isaac, was born, and when Isaac was eight days old, Abraham circumcised him. Later Isaac's son, Jacob, was born, and Isaac similarly circumcised him. And Jacob similarly circumcised his twelve sons. They are the twelve men from whom we(inc) Jews have all descended.”

⁹“ You know that Jacob's older sons became jealous because their father favored their younger brother Joseph. So they sold him to merchants/traders who took him MTY to Egypt. There he became a slave of an official who lived there. But God helped Joseph.

¹⁰He protected him whenever people caused him to suffer. He enabled Joseph to be wise; and he caused Pharaoh, the king of Egypt, to think well of Joseph. So Pharaoh appointed him to rule over Egypt and to look after all of Pharaoh's property MTY.”

¹¹“ While Joseph was doing that work, there was a time ◄when there was very little food/of famine► throughout Egypt and also throughout Canaan. People did not have enough food to eat. People were suffering. At that time Jacob and his sons in Canaan also could not find enough food.

¹²When Jacob heard people report that there was grain/food that people could buy in Egypt, he sent Joseph's older brothers to go there to buy grain. They went and bought grain from Joseph, but they did not recognize him. Then they returned home.

¹³When Joseph's brothers went to Egypt the second time, they again bought grain from Joseph. But this time he told them who he was. And people told Pharaoh that Joseph's people were Hebrews and that those men who had come from Canaan were his brothers.

¹⁴Then after Joseph sent his brothers back home, they told their father Jacob that Joseph wanted him and his entire family to come to Egypt. At that time ◄ Jacob's family consisted of seventy-five people/there were seventy-five people in Jacob's family► SYN.

¹⁵So when Jacob heard that, he and all his family went to live in Egypt.” Acts 7:15b-16 “ Later on, Jacob died there, and our other ancestors, his sons, also died there.

¹⁶But the bodies of Jacob and Joseph were brought { they brought the bodies of Jacob and Joseph} back to our land, and Jacob's body was buried {they buried Jacob's body} in the tomb that Abraham had bought, and they buried Joseph's body in Shechem in the ground that Jacob had bought from Hamor's sons.”

¹⁷“Our ancestors had become very numerous when it was almost time for God to rescue them from Egypt, as he had promised Abraham that he would do.

¹⁸Another king had begun to rule in Egypt. He did not know that Joseph, long before that time, had greatly helped the people of Egypt MTY.

¹⁹That king cruelly tried to get rid of our ancestors. He oppressed them and caused them to suffer greatly. He even commanded them to leave their baby boys outside their homes so that they would die.”

²⁰“During that time Moses was born, and he was a very beautiful LIT child. So his parents secretly cared for him in their house for three months.

²¹Then they had to put him outside the house, but Pharaoh's daughter found him and adopted him and cared for him as though he were her own son.

²²Moses was taught { The Egyptian teachers taught Moses} many kinds of wise things HYP that the people in Egypt knew, and when he grew up, he spoke powerfully and did things powerfully.”

²³“ One day when Moses was about forty years old, he decided that he would go and see his fellow Israelis. So he went to the place where they worked.

²⁴He saw an Egyptian beating one of the Israels. So he went over to help MTY the Israeli man who was being hurt/beat {whom the Egyptian was hurting/beating}, and he ◄got revenge on/paid back► the Israeli man by killing the Egyptian who was hurting/beating him.

²⁵Moses was thinking that his fellow Israelis would understand that God had sent him to free them from being slaves. But they did not understand that.

²⁶The next day, Moses saw two Israeli men fighting each other. He tried to make them stop fighting by saying to them, ‘Men, you two are fellow Israelis! So ◄stop hurting each other!/why are you hurting each other?► RHQ’

²⁷But the man who was injuring the other man pushed Moses away and said to him, ‘◄No one appointed you (sg) to rule and judge us (exc)!/Do you (sg) think someone appointed you (sg) to rule and judge us (exc)?► RHQ

²⁸Do you want to kill me as you killed the Egyptian yesterday?’

²⁹When Moses heard that, he thought to himself, ‘Obviously, people know what I have done, and someone will kill me.’ He was afraid, so he fled from Egypt to Midian land. He lived there for some years. He got married, and he and his wife had two sons.”

³⁰“ One day forty years later, the Lord God appeared as an angel to Moses. He appeared in a bush that was burning in the desert near Sinai Mountain.

³¹When Moses saw that, he was greatly surprised, because the bush was not burning up. As he went over to look more closely, he heard the Lord God say to him,

³²‘I am the God whom your ancestors worshipped. I am the God that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob worship.’ Moses was so afraid that he began to shake. He was afraid to look at the bush any longer.

³³Then the Lord God said to him, ‘Take your sandals off to show that you(sg) revere me. Because I am here, the place where you are standing is holy/sacred.

³⁴I have surely seen how the people of Egypt are continually causing my people to suffer. I have heard my people when they groan because those people continually oppress them. So I have come down to rescue them from Egypt. Now get ready, because I am going to send you back to Egypt to do that.’ ”

³⁵“This Moses is the one who had tried to help our Israeli people, but whom they rejected by saying, ‘No one RHQ appointed you to rule and judge us!’ Moses is the one whom God himself sent to rule them and to free them from being slaves. He is the one whom an angel in the bush commanded to do that.

³⁶Moses is the one who led our ancestors out from Egypt. He did many kinds of miracles in Egypt, at the Red Sea, and during the forty years that the Israelite people lived in the desert.

³⁷This Moses is the one who said to the Israelite people, ‘God will appoint a prophet for you from among your own people. He will speak words from God, just like I speak his words to you.’

³⁸This man Moses was our people's leader when they gathered together in the desert. It is Moses to whom God sent the angel on Mount Sinai to give him our laws, and he was the one who told our other ancestors what the angel had said. He was the one who received from God words that tell us how to live eternally, and Moses passed them on to us.”

³⁹“ However, our ancestors did not want to obey Moses. Instead, while he was still on the mountain, they rejected him as their leader and decided that they wanted to return to Egypt.

⁴⁰So they told his older brother Aaron, ‘Make idols for us who will be our gods to lead us back to Egypt! As for that fellow Moses who led us out of Egypt we (exc) do not know what has happened to him!’

⁴¹So, they made out of gold an image that looked like a calf. Then they sacrificed animals and offered other things to honor that idol, and they sang and danced to honor the idol that they themselves had made.

⁴²So God rejected them. He abandoned them to worship the sun, moon and stars in the sky. This agrees with the words that one of the prophets wrote that God said, You Israelite people MTY, when you repeatedly killed animals and offered them as sacrifices during those forty years that you were in the desert, ◄you most certainly were not offering them to me!/what makes you think that you were offering them to me?► RHQ

⁴³On the contrary, you carried with you from place to place the tent that contained the idol representing the god Molech that you worshipped. You also carried with you the image of the star called Rephan. Those were idols that you had made, and you worshipped them instead of me. So I will cause you to be taken away { people to take you} from your own country. You will be taken { They will take you} far from your homes to regions even farther than Babylon.”

⁴⁴“While our ancestors were in the desert, they worshipped God at the tent that showed that he was there with them. They had made the tent exactly like God had commanded Moses to make it. It was exactly like the model that Moses had seen when he was up on the mountain.

⁴⁵Later on, other ancestors of ours carried that tent with them when Joshua led them into this land. That was during the time that they took this land for themselves, when God forced the people who previously lived here to leave. So the Israelis were able to possess this land. The tent remained in this land and was still here when King David ruled.

⁴⁶David pleased God, and he asked God to let him build a house where he and all of our Israeli people could worship God.

⁴⁷But instead, God let David's son Solomon build a house where people could worship God.”

⁴⁸“However, we(inc) know that God is greater than everything, and he does not live in houses that people SYN have made. It is like the prophet Isaiah wrote. He wrote these words that God had spoken: