Ver. 30. ἵητούντων: “and as the sailors were seeking,” R.V.; “about to flee,” A.V. is incorrect, for they were planning possible means of escape, and could scarcely be said to be about to escape, cf. B text—if they succeeded the passengers and the soldiers would thus be left to their fate.—mpod. ὥς: under colour, under pretence, specie, cf. Mark xii. 40, Luke xx. 47, John xy. 22, Phil. 1. 18, 1 Thess. ii. 5. Cf. for its use here Thuc., ν., 53. Vi., 76. For ὡς cf. xvii. 14, xxviii.
29—33-
a
ὡς ἐκ πρώρας μελλόντων ἀγκύρας ἐκτείνειν, 31. εἶπεν 6 Παῦλος τῷ ἑκατοντάρχῃ καὶ τοῖς στρατιώταις, "Edy μὴ οὗτοι µείνωσιν ἐν τῷ
πλοίῳ, ὑμεῖς σωθῆναι οὐ δύνασθε.
κ] , [ον 7 ee ) aa > a τὰ σχοινία τῆς σκάφης, καὶ εἴασαν αὐτὴν ἐκπεσειν.
33. τότε οἱ στρατιῶται ἀπέκοψαν
43. ἄχρι δὲ οὗ
ἔμελλεν ἡμέρα γίνεσθαι, παρεκάλει 6 Παῦλος ἅπαντας µεταλαβεῖν
τροφῆς, λέγων, Τεσσαρεσκαιδεκάτην σήμερον ἡμέραν προσδοκῶντες,
19, Luke xxiii. 14, and ὡς µέλλων with present infinitive active as here, Acts xxili. 15, 20, Klostermann, Vindicie Lucane, Ῥ. 54.--ἐκτείνειν: “lay out anchors,” R.V., Ramsay, 7.¢., at the full length of the cable. The sailors pretended that more anchors from the prow would help to steady the ship, and that they must go off in a boat to carry them out to cable’s length, rather than drop them out as in ver. 20.---ἐκτ.: a technical ex- pression (cf. élonger, Vars, p. 248, and so ῥίπτειν in ver. 29, mouiller), Breusing, Pp- 195. It seems impossible to suppose with Breusing, p. 194, and Vars, p. 248 (so also Goerne), that the sailors may have been actuated by an honourable motive, and that they wished to put off in the boat to see if the soundings and the nature of the ground allowed the ship to get nearer shore, for although St. Paul’s words do not expressly accuse them of treachery, yet the narrative of his companion does so, cf. προφάσει, etc. But, as Breusing himself points out, St. Paul’s words issued in the best result, for the centurion’s counsel prevented a terrible scene of sauve qui peut (as in the stranding of the Cimbria, Goerne).
Ver. 31. ἡὑμεῖς not ἡμεῖς: St. Paul appeals to the law of self-preservation, and the centurion acts promptly on his advice; although safety had been divinely promised, human means were not ex- cluded, and it is altogether hypercritical to find any contradiction here with νυν. 24-26, as Holtzmann supposes.
Ver. 32. τότε οἱ στρ. ἀπέκ.: Lewin, Saint Paul, ii., 202, sees in this the abso- Iute ascendency which St. Paul had gained; he had said that their lives should be spared, and although, humanly speaking, the boat offered the best pros- pect of reaching land, yet at a word from St. Paul the soldiers deprived them- selves even of this last resource.— σχοινία: only elsewhere in N.T. in John ii. 15; in classical Greek, and also frequently in LXX. For the terrible scene which would doubtless have en- sued if the soldiers had not thus acted, Breusing and Vars (so Wetstein, in loco) strikingly compare the description of a
shipwreck in Achilles Tatius, iii., 3; the whole passage is cited by Breusing, Pp. 194.
Ver. 33. ἄχρι δὲ οὗ: only used by Luke in the historical books of the N.T., cf. Luke xxi. 24, Acts vii. 18; in St. Paul’s Epistles three or four times, Heb. iii. 13, Rev. ii. 25. Ramsay renders “and while the day was coming on,” so A. and R.V.; dum with imperfect, Heb. iii. 13 (Blass). But Rendall takes it as = until, as if Paul had continued his entreaties until close on dawn (imperfect).—peradaBeiv τροφῆς, cf. ii. 46 for the same phrase, only in Luke in Ν.Τ.---τεσσαρεσκ.... προσθοκῶντες κ.τ.λ.: “this is the four- teenth day that ye wait (A.V. ‘tarry,’ Ramsay, ‘ watch’) and continue fasting ’’. Rendall renders ‘this is the fourteenth day that ye have continued fasting on the watch for the dawn”—npood. sc. ἡμέραν, as if St. Paul did not mean a fourteenth day of continuous fasting, but fourteen successive nights of anxious watching for the dawn, all alike spent in restless hungry expectation of what the day might reveal (Acts, p. 347), but προσδοκᾶν is here without an object as in Luke iii. 15 (Weiss). For the word see further xxviil. 6, and cf. προσδοκία only in Acts xii, rr and Luke xxi. 26. On the accusative of time, as expressed here, cf. Blass, Gram., p. 03.---ἄσιτοι διατελεῖτε: precisely the same colloca- tion of words occur in Galen, εἴ ποτε ἄσιτος διετέλεσεν, so also καὶ ἄδιψοι διατελοῦσιν, and Hippocrates speaks of a man who continued suffering πάσχων διατελέει for fourteen days (see Hobart and Zahn). It must however be ad- mitted that the same collocation as in this verse ἄσιτοι and διατελεῖν is found in Dion. Hal. (Wetstein, ix loco). For the construction see Winer- Moulton, xlv., 4; cf. Thuc., i., 34.—pndév προσλ., i.e., taking no regular meal, so Wéiss, Blass, Zockler, Alford, Plumptre, Felten, Bethge, Wendt. Breusing, p. 106, and Vars, p. 250, both explain the word as meaning that in their perilous and hope- less condition those on board had not gone to fetch their regular food and rations, but had subsisted on any bits of