Did Stephen confuse the cave of Machpelah with the field at Shechem in Acts 7:16?

Yes — the sentence conflates two patriarchal land-purchases. The Genesis source-texts preserve both transactions independently, and the conflation is plain on the surface of Stephen's speech.

Here is the verse:

καὶ μετετέθησαν εἰς Συχὲμ καὶ ἐτέθησαν ἐν τῷ μνήματι ᾧ ὠνήσατο Ἀβραὰμ τιμῆς ἀργυρίου παρὰ τῶν υἱῶν Ἑμμὼρ ἐν Συχέμ

«And they were carried over to Shechem, and laid in the tomb that Abraham bought for a sum of silver from the sons of Hamor in Shechem.» — Acts 7:16

Now the two Genesis source-passages. The Machpelah purchase is unambiguous:

וַיִּשְׁקֹל אַבְרָהָם לְעֶפְרֹן אֶת הַכֶּסֶף ... אַרְבַּע מֵאוֹת שֶׁקֶל כֶּסֶף

«And Abraham weighed out for Ephron the silver ... four hundred shekels of silver.» — Genesis 23:16

Abraham. Ephron the Hittite. Hebron. Four hundred shekels. A cave.

The Shechem purchase is just as unambiguous, but it belongs to Jacob two generations later:

וַיִּקֶן אֶת חֶלְקַת הַשָּׂדֶה אֲשֶׁר נָטָה שָׁם אָהֳלוֹ מִיַּד בְּנֵי חֲמוֹר אֲבִי שְׁכֶם בְּמֵאָה קְשִׂיטָה

«And he bought the parcel of a field where he had pitched his tent, from the hand of the sons of Hamor, Shechem's father, for a hundred qesitah.» — Genesis 33:19

Jacob. Hamor. Shechem. A hundred qesitah. A field.

Two different patriarchs. Two different sellers. Two different cities. Two different currencies. Stephen's sentence puts Abraham at the Shechem field — and Abraham was never at the Shechem field. The Genesis text knows the difference. Joshua 24:32 will later record that Joseph's bones were brought up from Egypt and buried «in Shechem, in the parcel of ground that Jacob bought from the sons of Hamor for a hundred qesitah» — naming Jacob explicitly as the buyer.

So how do we read Acts 7:16? Three honest options have been proposed across the history of interpretation, and they should be named rather than smoothed over.

The first reading takes the conflation as deliberate. Stephen is summarizing two patriarchal land-purchases as a single typological act — the patriarchs buy graves with silver in a land they do not yet inherit. The point of his speech is the sojourner's posture (Acts 7:5 has already noted that God «gave him no inheritance in it, not even a foot's length»), and the rhetorical fusion of the two purchases serves that argument.

The second reading takes the conflation as Stephen's own summary, where memory has compressed two well-known events into a single line. Stephen is speaking under indictment, in a Spirit-filled defense, and the text of Acts records the speech as he gave it — including its compressions.

The third reading attempts harmonization — proposing that Abraham may have made an earlier purchase at Shechem unrecorded in Genesis, or that the verse blends with traditional Jewish accounts of patriarchal burials at multiple sites. The Genesis source-data does not support this directly, and the harmonizing readings are inferential rather than textual.

What the article does not try to do is force a resolution. The two Genesis source-fields are both present in the database, both verifiable, both attributed to the right patriarch. The textual difficulty in Acts 7:16 is real. What both source-passages share, and what Stephen's speech foregrounds, is the patriarchal posture: silver weighed for a burial-plot in promised land they did not yet hold. That posture is the spine of the speech, and it is the spine of the Genesis 23 cave-purchase, and it is the spine of Hebrews 11:13.

The full study names the difficulty, cites both Genesis source-passages, and leaves the adjudication to studies of Acts and reception history. What it preserves is the lens that Hebrews and Peter and Paul all reach for: paroikos kai parepidemos — sojourner and stranger.