Interethnic Marriages in Acts 7:29 and 16:1–3

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Interethnic Marriages in Acts 7:29 and 16:1–3

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The Old Testament offers many more examples of interethnic marriage than the New Testament does. ⁶¹¹ Since many major figures of the New Testament were either unmarried (like John the Baptist, Jesus, and Paul) or married locally (like Peter), most of the New Testament examples are comments on Old Testament figures (e.g., Matt 1:3–6; Acts 7:29), though the New Testament offers an example of a mixed-race minister (Acts 16:1–3). My original article explored Matthew 1 as well as the passages in Acts; I have deleted that section here to maintain the present volume’s focus on Acts.

For the sake of precision, I should point out that our source material in Scripture addresses marriages that were mostly “interethnic” rather than “interracial” in the common sense of the term in US history. It was primarily slavery that made “interracial” unions a problematic issue in US history;⁶¹² the traditional racial categories usually employed today (which do not even correspond precisely to complexion) arose through historical circumstances, not because of clear-cut biological or genetic boundaries.⁶¹³ The dominant ethnic division addressed in the New Testament is between Jew and gentile. How Scripture addresses this dominant division offers us models for crossing such barriers today. If God summons us to surmount a barrier that he himself established, how much more would he summon us to surmount all other barriers?

Interethnic marriages in Scripture not only challenge traditional prejudices in many cultures, but also offer encouragement to those who are interethnically married. (For the sake of full disclosure: my wife, Dr. Médine Moussounga Keener, is black and from Congo-Brazzaville; I am white and from the United States.) Indeed, while all Christian marriage should especially reflect the relationship between Christ and the church, interethnic Christian marriage additionally should reflect the unity of believers across cultural and ethnic lines. Two passages in Acts alluding to interethnic marriages may fit this emphasis in the larger context of their writers’ themes.

Moses’s Mixed Marriage (Acts 7:29)

The context of a mention of Moses’s mixed children in Acts 7 is significant. Many scholars recognize that Stephen’s rehearsal of Israel’s history in Acts 7 “decentralizes” the holy land.⁶¹⁴ By showing that God can reveal himself anywhere, Stephen lays the theological groundwork for the gentile mission carried out by his colleagues Philip and the other Hellenist Christian workers. Stephen’s enemies have charged him with devaluing the temple, “this holy place” (6:13); Stephen shows from Scripture that even a place in the Egyptian wilderness can be holy if God is there (7:33).

Stephen follows closely the verses in Exodus about Moses’s fellow-Israelites rejecting him, but then omits most details about Moses between his flight from Egypt and his revelation at Mount Sinai. One significant exception to these omissions appears in the brief summary that he “became the father of two sons” in Midian (7:29). Why would Stephen digress in his defense speech to emphasize this point? He introduces his mention of the sons with the term “where,” connecting the sons with the location Midian and gently recalling something for Moses that his contemporaries did not normally approve: marriage with gentiles. Moses had married a Midianite woman (Exod 2:21–22; cf. later his marriage to a Nubian in Num 12:1, if that woman is a different one).

Both Moses’s interethnic union and the birth of his two sons in a foreign land are important to the narrative in Exodus. In contrast to traditional scholarly divisions of the Pentateuch into hypothetical sources, there is a clear narrative unity between Genesis and Exodus. Thus Moses, betrayed by his own people, abandoned his role as a prince of Egypt, married the daughter of a Midianite priest and named his first son for his foreign sojourn (Exod 2:22). Joseph, rejected by his brothers, married the daughter of an Egyptian priest and likewise named his first son for his foreign sojourn (41:51). As Moses had two sons (Exod 18:3, 6), so did Joseph (Gen 40:50; 46:27; 48:1, 9).⁶¹⁵

Because Stephen follows the forensic convention of charging his accusers (cf. 7:51–53),⁶¹⁶ he foreshadows his denunciation of their rejection of Jesus by emphasizing how often God’s people had rejected his servants.⁶¹⁷ To this end, he highlights the examples of the rejected deliverers Joseph and Moses (7:9, 27, 35, 39), both of whom had to marry foreigners. Stephen’s “typology”—his recognition of a pattern in the lives of rejected deliverers⁶¹⁸—is not eisegesis. It develops a literary pattern already evident in our current form of the narratives of Genesis and Exodus, which compare and contrast Joseph and Moses:⁶¹⁹

^Joseph

^Moses

^{His brothers sold him into slavery}

^{His family, who were slaves, rescued him from slavery}

^{Midianites sold Joseph into Egypt}

^{Midianites received Moses when he escaped Egypt}

^{Joseph became a “father” to Pharaoh (Gen 45 : 8 )}

^{Moses became a son to Pharaoh’s daughter}

^{In one day, Joseph was exalted from slavery, over Egypt}

^{Moses quickly lost his royalty in Egypt by identifying with slaves}

^{Joseph made all Egypt Pharaoh’s slaves ( 47 : 19 )}

^{Moses freed slaves; through him God judged Pharaoh’s power}

^{Joseph came from Jacob’s house to Egypt as a deliverer}

^{Moses came from Pharaoh’s house from Egypt as a deliverer}

^{Joseph’s God delivered Egypt in famine}

^{Moses’s God struck Egypt, including its productivity, with plagues}

^{Joseph, exiled in Egypt, married an Egyptian}

^{Moses, exiled from Egypt, married Midianite (and Cushite)}

^{Asenath’s father is priest of On}

^{Zipporah’s father is priest of Midian}

^{Asenath bore two initial sons}

^{Zipporah bore two initial sons}

^{The first son’s name reflected Joseph’s sojourn in a foreign land}

^{The first son’s name reflected Moses’s sojourn in a foreign land}

^{God raised Joseph up to bring Israel to Egypt}

^{God raised Moses up to bring Israel out of Egypt}

^{Joseph’s leadership was initially rejected by brothers}

^{Moses’s leadership was initially rejected by his people}

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