'And Moses Was Instructed in All the Wisdom of The

‘and moses was instructed in all the wisdom’ 153

‘AND MOSES WAS INSTRUCTED IN ALL THE WISDOM OF THE EGYPTIANS’ (ACTS 7.22)

Ton Hilhorst

In his speech to the Sanhedrin, which forms the seventh chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, Stephen offers a summary of the history of Israel. Not surprisingly, the facts narrated usually come from the Old Testament, but there are also amplifications vis-à-vis the source text. This is notably the case in the account of Moses’ childhood. Thus, whereas Exodus 2.10 describes Moses’ adoption by Pharaoh’s daughter simply by saying ‘and he became her son’, Acts 7.21-22 expands this to 21 avnei,lato auvto.n h` quga,thr Faraw. kai. avneqre,yato auvto.n e`auth/| eivj ui`o,n. 22kai. evpaideu,qh Mwu?sh/j evn pa,sh| sofi,a| Aivgupti,wn( h=n de. dunato.j evn lo,goij kai. e;rgoij auvtou/) 21 Pharaoh’s daughter adopted him and brought him up as her own son. 22 And Moses was instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and he was mighty in his words and deeds.1 In this paper, we will take a closer look at this expansion, in particu- lar at Moses’ instruction ‘in all the wisdom of the Egyptians’. What does the expression ‘the wisdom of the Egyptians’ mean? Indeed, what could Moses learn from the oppressors of his people, mere idol worshippers at that? Our approach will be threefold. First of all, we will investigate the ideas that may have shaped the picture in Acts. We will ask what can have been meant by ‘wisdom’, what image the author may have had of Egypt and its culture, and what link there was, if any, between Moses’ Egyptian education and his might in words and deeds. Secondly, we will review what early Jewish literature had to say about Moses receiving an Egyptian education; maybe the author of Acts was indebted to traditions voiced there. And finally we will study our topic ‘downstream’, and ask what Acts 7.22 meant to

1 English translations are taken from the Revised Standard Version for biblical passages and the Loeb Classical Library for classical passages, unless otherwise indicated. 154 ton hilhorst

Christian readers in the first four centuries. Besides being interesting from the point of view of reception history, their views may possibly also contribute to shedding light on the verse.

1. The wisdom of the Egyptians in Acts 7.22

Some centuries ago, Acts 7.22 played a crucial role in discussions about the origin and history of civilizations. Indeed, as Jan Assmann puts it in his Moses the Egyptian, ‘the Moses discourse in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries almost exclusively based its image of Moses not on Moses’ elaborate biography in the Pentateuch, but on this single verse in the New Testament’.2 A fatal blow to speculations about ancient Egypt was inflicted by Champollion’s decipherment of the hieroglyphs in 1822, and the consequences also made themselves felt in biblical studies. As a result, the question of what is meant by ‘the wisdom of the Egyptians’ in Acts 7.22 has barely attracted modern New Testament scholarship. Bibliographies fail to mention any title on the subject,3 monographs focus on other aspects of Acts4 and commentaries are usually content to repeat earlier commentaries referring to Lucian, Philopseudes 34, and so merely transfer the problem.5 The only commentary that has shown interest in the statement is, to the best of our knowledge, the one by Eugène Jacquier, which appeared in 1926 in the ‘Études Bibliques’ series.6 But there seems to be more that can be said. Let us begin by tackling the term ‘wisdom’, or rather the Greek term sofi,a. In ancient Greek, the Lexicon of Liddell and Scott informs us, it denotes (1) properly cleverness or skill in handicraft and art, in music and singing, in poetry, in driving, in medicine or surgery, in divination;

2 Assmann 1999, 10; cf. ibid., 56. 3 Thus the only title Langevin 1985 provides for Acts 7.22 is Gonzalo Maeso 1974, in which we are told that since Moses, witness Acts 7.22, was instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, we have to study Egyptian culture thoroughly in order to understand the Old Testament! 4 Such as Kastner 1967 and Lierman 2004. The same is true for Bovon 1978. 5 Lucian speaks of ‘a man from Memphis, one of the scribes of the temple, won- derfully learned, familiar with all the culture of the Egyptians’ (qauma,sioj th.n sofi,an kai. th.n paidei,an pa/san eivdw.j th.n Aivgu,ption). The ‘culture of the Egyptians’ here amounts to magical skill, cf. the sequel to the words cited: ‘He was said to have lived underground for twenty-three years in their sanctuaries, learning magic from Isis’. 6 Jacquier 1926, 215-16; cf., furthermore, Barclay 1992, 41.