What Does Acts 17:22 Mean?
Then Paul stood in the midst of the Rock of Ares and said, Men of Athens, I see that in all things you are exceedingly given to awe of the gods.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
Then Paul stood in the midst of Mars’ hill, and said, Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious.THE KEY
Your life can be intensely oriented toward the divine even while what you are reaching toward remains unnamed.
THE MEANING
Your attention already gathers around what you regard as sacred. Reverence and uncertainty can stand together: the desire to honor the divine can be real even when its nature remains unrecognized.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that sincere reverence means you already understand what you are reaching toward.
THE ROOT
δεισιδαιμονεστέρους
deisidaimonesterous
GROWS FROM
δεισιδαιμον-
deisidaimon-
A compound stem naming fear or reverence toward divine powers.
“exceedingly given to awe of the gods” in this verse is deisidaimonesterous. The word can carry reverence for divine powers as well as superstitious fear. It recognizes a life already turned toward the sacred, even where its object remains unknown.
ALSO GROWS
deisidaimonia: Religious devotion or superstition.
δεισιδαιμονία
This related noun appears in Acts 25:19, where the same word family describes religious questions.
daimonia: Divine beings or spirits; rendered “gods” in Acts 17:18.
δαιμόνια
It shares the compound’s element for divine powers, showing what the reverence in this word is directed toward.
THE PATTERN
Human devotion always takes a direction: what receives the whole heart is what a person treats as divine.
And you shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your living soul, and with all your might.who exchanged the truth of God for the lie, and bowed down and served the creation beside the one who created, who is praised for the ages. Amen.For as I passed through and looked closely at your shrines, I found an altar with this writing upon it, TO THE UNKNOWN GOD. So what you revere without knowing, this I announce to you.THE THREAD
But they had certain matters they sought against him concerning their own awe of the divine powers, and concerning one Jesus, who had died, whom Paul declared to be living.The word translated “superstition” here is the noun form in the same Greek word family as “too superstitious” in Acts 17:22. Its use for religious questions lets the earlier phrase hold both shades at once: devotion toward the divine, and uncertainty about what is divine.
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