In order to make it obvious what “assembly” is referred to by the expression “in the assembly in the desert” the Good News Translation has translated the people of Israel assembled in the desert. Phillips is confusing in employing “in that church in the desert…”; and most other translations have not done much by way of improvement.

According to the Hebrew text it was the Lord himself who gave Moses the Law, but later Jewish tradition introduced an angel as a mediator, thus maintaining God’s distinctiveness and separateness from the world. Even though Phillips has evidently tried to capture the flavor of the tense of the participle “the angel who used to talk with him,” it is doubtful if Luke intends for his readers to look upon the conversation between Moses and the angel as an habitual action in past time.

It is important to indicate that the pronoun he of verse 38 refers to Moses. Unless one is careful, the reference may be to the prophet who was to come.

The term assembled is in some languages translated as “came together,” but in other languages it is more equivalent to “who formed a large group.”

God’s living messages is literally “living oracles.” An “oracle” means “a message from God.” This phrase is translated variously: “words of life” (Jerusalem Bible), “living oracles” (Revised Standard Version), “oracles of life” (New American Bible), “living utterances of God” (New English Bible), “living words” (Phillips and Moffatt), and “utterances that still live” (An American Translation*). In this context living seems to mean that these words are enduring or lasting. If one assumes that living refers to the contents of the message, then one may translate as “message concerning how one is to live.” This interpretation is, however, much less satisfactory than living as an expression of an enduring quality, for example, “a message which continues” or “a message which lasts always.”

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 .