Acts Chapter 7 verse 22 Holy Bible

Pulpit Commentary

Pulpit CommentaryVerse 22. - Instructed for learned, A.V.; he was mighty for was mighty, A.V.; in his words and works for in words and in deeds, A.V. and T.R. The statement of Moses being instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, though not found in Exodus, was doubtless true. Josephus makes Thermeutis speak of him as "of a noble understanding;" and says that he was "brought up with much care and diligence." And Philo, in his life of Moses(quoted by Whitby), says he was smiled in music, geometry, arithmetic, and hieroglyphics, and the whole circle of arts and sciences.

Ellicott's Commentary

Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers(22) Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians.--Better, was trained, or instructed. There is no direct statement to this effect in the history of the Pentateuch, but it was implied in Moses being brought up as the son of Pharaoh's daughter, and was in harmony with later paraphrases and expansions of the earlier history. The narrative of Josephus (as above) and the references in the New Testament to Jannes and Jambres as the magicians who withstood Moses (2Timothy 3:8), and to the dispute of Michael and Satan as to his body (Jude 1:9), indicate the wide acceptance of some such half-legendary history. The passage is instructive, (1) as an indirect plea on the part of Stephen, like that afterwards made by Clement of Alexandria (Strom. i. 5, ? 28; 6:5, ? 42) and Justin (Dial. c. Tryph. c. 1-4), for the recognition of heathen wisdom as an element in the divine education of mankind; (2) as having contributed to fix the attention of the more cultivated and scholarly of the early Christian critics, such as those named, and Origen, and Jerome, and Augustine, on the teaching of Greek poets and philosophers, and having furnished them with a sanction for such studies.Mighty in words and in deeds.--Josephus (Ant. ii. 10), still following the same traditional history, relates that Moses commanded the Egyptian forces in a campaign against the Ethiopians, and protected them against the serpents that infected the country, by transporting large numbers of the ibis that feeds on serpents. The romance was completed by the marriage of Moses with the daughter of the Ethiopian king who had fallen passionately in love with him. This was possibly a development of the brief statement in Numbers 12:1. The language of Moses (Exodus 4:10), in which he speaks of himself as "not eloquent" and "slow of speech," seems at first inconsistent with "mighty in words," but may fairly be regarded as simply the utterance of a true humility shrinking from the burden of a mighty task.