Scattered People Carry the Word Farther

The chapter break falls in the middle of the scene: this clause still belongs to Stephen’s stoning. “Consenting” is syneudokeo, to approve alongside others, and Paul will use the same word of himself in 22:20. “Judæa and Samaria” are the second and third names on the map Jesus drew in 1:8.

“Devout men” is the word used of the pious Jews gathered at Pentecost (2:5) and of Simeon in Luke 2:25. The Mishnah (Sanhedrin 6:6) forbade open mourning for someone put to death by the court, so loud lamentation over Stephen may itself have been an act of dissent; that is an inference from later law, not a statement of the text.

“Made havock” renders lumainomai, a word for a wild animal mauling its prey or an army ravaging a country, found only here in the New Testament. “Haling” is the old spelling of hauling. The believers met in houses (2:46), so the search went where they gathered, and Paul later admits the women too (22:4).

“Scattered abroad” is diaspeiro, the verb for sowing seed broadcast by hand, so the persecution does what a sower does. “Preaching the word” is one Greek verb, euangelizomai, to announce good news. Acts 11:19 picks up this exact phrase to follow some of these travellers as far as Phoenicia, Cyprus and Antioch.

This is Philip of the seven chosen in 6:5 to serve tables, not the apostle, who stayed in Jerusalem under verse 1. Every road out of Jerusalem “went down”, because the city sits high on the ridge. The old capital of Samaria had been rebuilt by Herod the Great and renamed Sebaste in honour of Augustus.

“With one accord” is homothumadon, the word Acts used for the Jerusalem believers at prayer in 1:14 and at the temple in 2:46, now given to a Samaritan crowd. “Gave heed” is prosecho, to hold the mind toward something, and it will be used twice more of the same city’s devotion to Simon in verses 10 and 11.

Unclean spirits cry out as they leave, just as they did before Jesus in Luke 4:33 and 8:28. “Palsies” is a contracted form of paralysis, passed into English through Old French. The lame being healed matches the man at the Beautiful gate in chapter 3, so Philip, who is not an apostle, does what Peter and John did.

Six words close the first scene. Joy is a thread through Luke’s writing, from the angels’ “good tidings of great joy” (Luke 2:10) onward, and this chapter ends with it too: the Ethiopian goes on his way rejoicing in verse 39. Both the city and the lone traveller finish in the same place.

“Used sorcery” is mageuo, to practise magic, from the same root as the magi. “Bewitched” is existemi, to astonish or drive out of one’s senses, and it is the very verb translated “wondered” in verse 13: the man who amazed a city will stand amazed. Later writers such as Justin Martyr and Irenaeus made him Simon Magus, father of heresies; Acts says none of that.

“From the least to the greatest” is a Septuagint idiom for an entire population, heard in Jeremiah 6:13. “The great power of God” may reflect a title; some scholars think “the Great Power” was a way of naming the supreme deity in Samaria, so the crowd was hailing Simon as a divine manifestation rather than a gifted man.

The verse explains the crowd’s loyalty by time: “of long time” he had held them. This is the third “gave heed” or “had regard” in six verses, the same Greek verb each time. The noun “sorceries”, mageia, appears nowhere else in the New Testament.

“The kingdom of God” is the phrase Acts opens with in 1:3 and closes with in 28:31, so Philip preaches the book’s own subject. The note “both men and women” follows the women seized in verse 3; Acts keeps counting women among both the persecuted and the baptized.

“Continued with” is proskartereo, to stick close and persist, the verb of 2:42, where the first converts “continued stedfastly” in the apostles’ teaching. “Miracles” here is dunameis, literally “powers”, the same word the Samaritans used when they called Simon “the great power of God”. He now watches powers he cannot produce.

Jerusalem sends a pair, as Jesus sent his disciples two by two (Luke 10:1). John is the disciple who in Luke 9:54 offered to call fire from heaven on a Samaritan village that turned Jesus away. He now travels to Samaria to pray for Samaritans. “Received the word of God” is the phrase used of the Gentiles in 11:1.

The apostles’ first act on arrival is prayer, not a laying on of hands. The Spirit is asked for rather than dispensed, in keeping with the promise in Luke 11:13 that the Father gives the Holy Spirit “to them that ask him”, written by the same author.

A parenthesis, the Book of Acts stepping aside to explain. “Fallen upon” is the verb used when the Spirit comes on Cornelius’s household (10:44, 11:15). The Greek says baptized “into” (eis) the name of the Lord Jesus, a phrase used in commercial papyri for money paid into someone’s account: the baptized now belong to him.

“Received” is in the imperfect tense, elambanon, “they were receiving”, which suggests the gift came person by person as hands were laid on each in turn. Hands were laid on the seven at their appointing in 6:6; here the same gesture accompanies prayer for the Spirit.

Simon “saw” something, which implies an outward sign that could be watched, such as the tongues of 2:4 and 10:46, though Acts does not say what it was. From this verse comes the word simony, the buying and selling of church office, coined in the Middle Ages and named after him.

“Also” is revealing: he wants to stand with the apostles, not among the Samaritans who received. “Power” here is exousia, authority or right, not the dunamis of the miracles in verse 13. He is asking to become a dispenser, whose hands would do what theirs did.

Literally “may your silver go with you into destruction”, a curse formula; J. B. Phillips famously rendered it “To hell with you and your money!” “Gift” is dorea, the word Peter used at Pentecost for “the gift of the Holy Ghost” (2:38). A gift purchased has stopped being one.

“Part” and “lot” are meris and kleros, the language of inherited shares. The Septuagint uses the same pair for the Levites, who had “no part nor inheritance” in the land (Deuteronomy 12:12), and kleros is the lot that fell on Matthias (1:26). “Not right” is literally “not straight”, echoing Psalm 78:37, where Israel’s heart “was not right with him”.

The “if perhaps” is not doubt about God’s willingness to forgive but a measure of how grave the thought was. “Thought” is epinoia, a scheme or design, found only here in the New Testament. Peter makes the way back concrete: repent, and pray God yourself.

“The gall of bitterness” reaches back to Deuteronomy 29:18, the warning against a root among Israel “that beareth gall and wormwood”, a heart that turns from the LORD. “The bond of iniquity” is a Septuagint phrase from Isaiah 58:6, where the fast God chooses is to loose such bonds.

Peter told Simon to pray; Simon asks others to pray for him, and in the plural. The request recalls Pharaoh’s “Intreat the LORD” to Moses (Exodus 8:8), a parallel some commentators draw, not one the text makes. Simon names only “these things which ye have spoken”, the curse, and says nothing of the heart Peter exposed.

“Testified” is diamartyromai, to bear solemn and thorough witness, a favourite verb of Acts. The imperfect of “preached” pictures a steady campaign village by village on the road south, roughly forty miles. Two men who had come to confirm a work end by extending it.

“Toward the south” can also be read “at noon”, since mesembria means both midday and the direction of the midday sun; it means noon in 22:6. If so, Philip is sent out in the hottest hour, when no one travelled. “Which is desert” may describe the road or old Gaza itself, destroyed in 96 BC and rebuilt nearer the coast.

Ethiopia here is Kush, the Nubian kingdom of Meroe on the upper Nile, not the modern country. Candace is a title, Kandake, the queen mother who ruled there, not a personal name. Deuteronomy 23:1 barred a castrated man from the assembly of the LORD, so a eunuch who travelled to worship would have stood at the edge of the temple courts.

Ancient readers normally read aloud, which is how Philip hears him in verse 30. A private scroll of Isaiah was costly; the wording quoted below follows the Greek Septuagint, so he was likely reading Greek. “Esaias” is the Greek form of Isaiah’s name, kept by the King James in the New Testament.

The Spirit speaks to one person in plain words, as he will again to Peter in 10:19 and to the church at Antioch in 13:2. “Join thyself” is kollao, to glue or bind oneself to, the verb of 5:13, where no outsider “durst join himself” to the apostles. Philip is told to attach himself to a moving vehicle.

Philip ran to keep pace with a travelling carriage on the road. His question is a wordplay in Greek, ginoskeis ha anaginoskeis, “do you know what you are knowing again?”, since the verb for reading is built on the verb for knowing. The play survives faintly in English as “understandest” and “readest”.

“Guide” is hodegeo, to lead along a road, the word Jesus used of blind guides (Matthew 15:14) and of the Spirit guiding into all truth (John 16:13). On an actual road, the reader asks for a road-guide to the text. “Come up” is literal: Philip climbs into the carriage beside him.

“The place” is periochē, a passage or section of text. The lines are Isaiah 53:7 in the Septuagint’s wording. Two animals appear, a sheep going to slaughter and a lamb before its shearer, one facing death and the other humiliation, and in both cases the silence is the point.

At this point the Septuagint differs from the Hebrew, which reads “he was taken from prison and from judgment”; Acts follows the Greek. “Who shall declare his generation?” asks who can speak of his descendants or his contemporaries. Three chapters on, Isaiah 56:3–5 promises eunuchs “a name better than of sons and of daughters”.

His question matched a live debate. Later Jewish interpretation often read the servant as Israel suffering among the nations, some read him as the prophet himself, and the Aramaic Targum on Isaiah applied the servant of 52:13 to the Messiah. The eunuch names the two options still argued: the prophet himself, or someone else.

“Opened his mouth” is a formula that marks the start of weighty speech, used of Jesus before the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:2) and of Peter at Cornelius’s house (10:34). Beside the passage about one who “opened not his mouth”, Philip opens his.

“Hinder” is koluo, to forbid or prevent, and it becomes a small refrain on the edges of the church: Jesus said of children “forbid them not” (Luke 18:16), Peter asks “Can any man forbid water” at Cornelius’s house (10:47), and Acts ends with Paul preaching “no man forbidding him” (28:31).

The verse is missing from the oldest Greek manuscripts and entered the printed Greek text with Erasmus, who knew it from the Latin. Yet Irenaeus quotes the confession around AD 180, so the wording is ancient. “Son of God” is the title Saul will preach in the synagogues right after his conversion (9:20).

He “commanded the chariot to stand still”, so there is a driver; he is a man accustomed to giving orders. The Greek stresses “both” three times: both went down, both Philip and the eunuch. They stand side by side in the water, the Jew from Jerusalem and the African from the queen’s court.

“Caught away” is harpazo, to snatch, the verb used of believers “caught up” in 1 Thessalonians 4:17. Obadiah feared that “the Spirit of the LORD shall carry thee whither I know not” when Elijah was sought (1 Kings 18:12), and Philip’s vanishing reads like that prophet’s. The eunuch does not look back; he goes on rejoicing.

Azotus is the Philistine city of Ashdod, some twenty miles up the coast from Gaza. “Was found” is a Septuagint idiom for turning up suddenly. His route north through the coastal plain passes Lydda and Joppa, the towns Peter will visit in the next chapter, before ending at Caesarea, Herod’s great harbour.