In order to indicate the time lapse between the making of the tent of God’s presence and the carrying of the tent into Palestine, the Good News Translation has connected verse 45 with verse 44 by the adverbial statement later on.

Who received … from their fathers translates the same Greek word that has been rendered “in turn” by the Revised Standard Version. The word itself means “to receive from a former owner”; and though the participial construction is rather awkward in the present sentence, the meaning is clear enough: it refers to something that was handed down from one generation to another (see Jerusalem Bible “it was handed down from one ancestor of ours to another”).

The difficult noun phrase “in the possessing (that is, taking possession) of the nations” is transformed into a more readily understood verbal expression by the Good News Translation, they … took over the land from the nations (see Jerusalem Bible “the country we had conquered from the nations”).

The first sentence of verse 45 is rather complex since it involves a number of diverse activities of our ancestors and includes two dependent clauses. In a number of languages such a complex sentence will need to be broken up, for example, “Later on, our ancestors received the tent from their fathers. They carried it with them when they went with Joshua. They carried it when they took over the land from the nations that God drove out before them.”

Because of the problem of temporal sequence in the last two verb expressions in the first sentence, it may be necessary to change the order, for example, “as God drove nations out ahead of the Israelites, they took over the land from these nations.”

The expression the time of David is often rendered as “the time when David lived” or “until the days (or years) of David.”

Quoted with permission from Newman, Barclay M. and Nida, Eugene A. A Handbook on The Acts of the Apostles. (UBS Handbook Series). New York: UBS, 1972. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .