Who bought the sepulchre in Sechem from the sons of Hamor?

What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.

How critical scholarship weighs this: Widely regarded as a genuine contradiction

This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.

This is a clean attribution flip with no neutral way to read it. Genesis 33:19 has Jacob buying the parcel near Shechem from "the children of Hamor, Shechem's father" for a hundred *qesitah*; Joshua 24:32 then invokes that same transaction to locate Joseph's burial "in a parcel of ground which Jacob bought of the sons of Hamor." Acts 7:16, in Stephen's speech, instead attributes the Shechem purchase to Abraham. The only land Abraham buys in Genesis is the cave of Machpelah at Hebron, purchased from Ephron the Hittite for four hundred shekels of silver (Gen 23) — a different patriarch, a different seller, a different city, and a different burial use. Stephen's verse has fused two distinct transactions: Abraham's purchase at Hebron and Jacob's purchase at Shechem. It also folds in a second discrepancy, since Genesis buries Jacob at Machpelah (Gen 50:13) and only Joseph's bones at Shechem (Josh 24:32), whereas Acts 7:15-16 has "our fathers" carried to Shechem.

The text-critical record shows that ancient scribes already felt the problem. The manuscript tradition of Acts 7:16 fractures over the reading: several witnesses omit or alter the name to relieve the difficulty, and copyists' attempts to smooth "Abraham" toward something more defensible are exactly the kind of secondary harmonization the harder reading explains. The instinct to fix it is itself evidence that the conflation was recognized early.

The traditional harmonization, in Archer's *Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties* and recycled in F. F. Bruce's Acts commentary, posits that Abraham bought a separate plot at Shechem that Genesis simply does not record — Abraham did build an altar at Shechem (Gen 12:6-7), so the inference is not absurd on its face. But there is no textual evidence for any Abrahamic purchase there, and the move invents an unattested transaction precisely shaped to plug the gap. The cleaner line, taken by I. Howard Marshall and in part by Bruce, is to grant that Luke is faithfully reporting what Stephen said, and that the speech telescopes patriarchal traditions in a way that does not track the Hebrew Bible's particulars — an honest reading that concedes the inaccuracy rather than dissolving it.

The critical consensus locates the cause upstream. C. K. Barrett's ICC treats Acts 7:16 as reflecting a synthetic Hellenistic-Jewish epitome of patriarchal history that had already merged the two purchase narratives — the kind of compressed summary common in Second Temple retellings (compare the abbreviating habits of Josephus and the *Antiquities*-style digests). Joseph Fitzmyer's Anchor Bible commentary calls it a "telescoping" of traditions, more diplomatically but to the same effect. Such compression is a recognized feature of the genre: speeches in Acts are Lukan compositions that summarize salvation history rapidly, and minor conflations are exactly what one expects. That explains how the error arose; it does not remove it. The canonical Acts 7:16 names Abraham as the buyer of a Shechem sepulchre from the sons of Hamor; Genesis 33 and Joshua 24 name Jacob.

Where the critical reading lands: genuine contradiction, most economically explained as a traditional conflation in Stephen's speech, not reconcilable without inventing an unrecorded purchase.