Later text
Acts 7:24BSB
And when he saw one of them being mistreated, Moses went to his defense and avenged him by striking down the Egyptian who was oppressing him.
Intertextuality Pair
Allusion
Later text
Acts 7:24BSB
And when he saw one of them being mistreated, Moses went to his defense and avenged him by striking down the Egyptian who was oppressing him.
Earlier text
Exodus 2:11BSB
One day, after Moses had grown up, he went out to his own people and observed their hard labor. He saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his own people.
Moses "went to his defense and avenged him by striking down the Egyptian who was oppressing him" (Acts 7:24; Exodus 2:11-12). Stephen presents Moses' act as a premature, misunderstood exercise of the deliverance vocation: Moses "assumed his brothers would understand that God was using him to deliver them, but they did not" (7:25). The would-be redeemer acts on behalf of his people and is not recognized. Stephen is exposing the recurring blindness of Israel to God's appointed deliverers — the same blindness that failed to discern in Jesus the far greater Redeemer working openly among them. Moses' zeal, flawed and untimely, still testifies to the God who raises up saviors for an oppressed people, and who at last sent the sinless Deliverer whose overthrow of the oppressor was accomplished not by the sword but by the cross (Hebrews 2:14-15).