BIBLE CONTRADICTION: HOW OLD WAS ABRAHAM WHEN ISHMAEL WAS BORN?

Even something as seemingly incontrovertible as how old Abram was when Ishmael was born has more than one answer (see Genesis 11:26; Genesis 11:32; Genesis 16:16; and Acts 7:2-4). This is one of those rather complicated and subtle problems in the Bible concerned with matters of chronology. So we must first of all keep in mind that the accurate transmission over the centuries of an ancient text is much more of a problem when it comes to numbers than to words in general. The reason boils down to the question of redundancy. If a word is accidentally misspelled, misplaced or repeated twice, the context of the sentence will usually make it quite easy to restore the original. By contrast, once a number is accidentally mis-copied by a scribe, there is practically no way to recover the original later on.

With that in mind, below are comments from scholars who attempt to describe the problem associated with determining Abraham's age as calculated from Genesis and trying to correlate it with Stephen's comments in Acts right before he was stoned to death. To put this “contradiction” into perspective, it is necessary to be reminded that absolutely no critical doctrinal issues are involved here, and the problem is so peripheral that most commentaries do not even bother mentioning it. By the way, do not get hung up on the extraordinarily long lifespans of these patriarchs. That is an entirely separate issue much too large to address in this post.

“Ishmael was born when Abraham was eighty-six, eleven years after his arrival in Canaan (xvi. 15,16; cf. xii. 4).” (Whitcomb) And Abraham did not travel there until his father, Terah, had died.

Marshall: “...there is a problem [with Acts 7:4] in that Abraham was seventy-five at this point, but according to Gen. 11:26,32, Terah was seventy when Abraham was born and died at the age of 205; on the basis of these figures, Abraham would have left Haran when Terah was 145 – that is, sixty years before he died.”

One possible solution is that Stephen was giving an extemporaneous speech citing OT Scripture by memory and that he simply made an error. But that is not the only possibility, as we see from the rest of Marshall's analysis below:

“Stephen's chronology can be supported by a combination of the statement by Philo that Abraham left Haran after Terah's death and the text of the Samaritan Pentateuch and the Pentateuch Targum, which give Terah's age at death as 145...Another suggestion is made by Larkin that Gen. 11:26 does not name Terah's sons in chronological order but places Abram, the youngest, first because of his importance. However Barrett holds that Stephen and Philo made the same simple mistake of reading the events in [Gen.] 11:32; 12:1 as being in the order in which they occurred.”

Marshall's comments above bring out another potential problem in reading the historical sections of the Bible. Events may be arranged according to some literary pattern or in order to stress certain events over others, rather than in a strictly chronological order.

Haacker: “Stephen's speech in Acts 7.2-53 contains several readings peculiar to the Samaritan Pentateuch and themes recalling specifically Samaritan traditions...The speech is not a literary fruit of the Samaritan mission, but gives insight into its theological cultural antecedents.” This has brought up the natural question as to whether Stephen himself was a Samaritan by upbringing. The answer to that is by no means certain, as comments below will show.

Since Bruce has also weighed in on this subject, I will present his thoughts to close this post. By the way, the noted Roman Catholic scholar Joseph Fitzmyer endorses Bruce's comments in his own exhaustive commentary on Acts.

“The chronological data of Gen. 11:26,32; 12:4, would suggest that Terah's death took place sixty years after Abram's departure from Haran. The older chronologers harmonized the evidence of Genesis with this statement of Stephen's by supposing that Terah was seventy years old (Gen. 11:26) when his oldest son (Haran) was born, and that Abraham was not born until Terah was a hundred and thirty – an improbable expedient. That Abraham did not leave Haran until his father died is asserted also by Philo. 

It is implied by the Samaritan Pentateuch, which gives Terah's age at death as a hundred and forty-five, not two hundred and five, as MT [standard Hebrew text] and LXX [early Greek translation] do (Gen. 11:32). Possibly a Greek version of Gen. 11:32, agreeing with the Samaritan text on Terah's age at death, but no longer extant, underlies the statement of Stephen and Philo.” (Bruce)