What Does Acts 26:8 Mean?
Why is it judged unsteady among you, that God raises the dead?
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
Why should it be thought a thing incredible with you, that God should raise the dead?THE KEY
The word “raise” also means “wake”: death is a state God can rouse someone from.
THE MEANING
The question places the human limit of death beside God’s agency: your inability to reverse death does not define God’s reach. It asks whether what seems impossible within human power must also be impossible for God.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that God can act only within the limits of what you have already seen happen.
THE ROOT
ἐγείρει
egeirei
GROWS FROM
ἐγερ-
eger-
to wake, rouse, or raise up
“raises” in this verse is egeirei. The word translated “raise” also means “wake” or “rouse.” It lets the verse picture the dead not as beyond God’s reach, but as able to be awakened by God.
ALSO GROWS
egersis: rising, raising, resurrection
ἔγερσις
This noun shares the same root and makes the “waking” sense explicit in words for rising from death.
synegeirō: raise together
συνεγείρω
This compound keeps the same raising root and shows it can describe people being brought up together.
ἄπιστον
apiston
GROWS FROM
πιστ-
pist-
trust, rely on; be trustworthy
“unsteady” in this verse is apiston. The word translated “incredible” is built from the trust-word with a negating prefix: it marks the raising as something deemed unbelievable. The hidden tension is about whether God’s agency can be trusted beyond what human experience has seen.
ALSO GROWS
pistis: trust
πίστις
This is the same word family; the verse’s “incredible” describes what seems impossible to trust or believe.
pistos: trustworthy, steady
πιστός
This related form names what can be relied on, echoing the question of whether raising the dead can be credited to God.
THE PATTERN
What humans call final, God’s life-giving power can bring into life.
Therefore prophesy, and say to them, Thus says the Lord GOD, Behold, O my people, I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, and bring you into the ground of Israel.For just as the Father raises the dead and makes them alive, so the Son makes alive whomever he wills.In an instant, in the flick of an eye, at the last trumpet; for it will sound, and the dead will be awakened undecaying, and we will be made other.THE THREAD
And he grasped the child by the hand and said to her, "Talitha cumi, little girl, I say to you, arise."The Greek word translated “arise” here is from the same root as “raise” in Acts 26:8. In one verse the word appears as a command to a girl who has died; in the other, it names what God can do for the dead.
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