What Does Acts 13:18 Mean in the King James?
And about the time of forty years suffered he their manners in the wilderness.
The analysis reads the King James wording.
King James Version The King James Version, first published in 1611. Selah Verse shows the standard text.
THE KEY
What the KJV calls God “suffering” the people’s manners carries the deeper image of bearing their ways through the wilderness.
THE MEANING
God’s presence meets you in the long stretch where your ways remain hard to bear: he bears with you inside the wilderness, not only after you emerge. Forty years names care sustained through time, while “suffered” keeps the strain of those ways visible. Being borne does not turn harmful conduct into approval.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The lie this loosens is that if your ways are still difficult, God has already withdrawn. The verse places divine endurance in the wilderness while leaving the difficulty of those ways intact.
THE ROOT
ἐτροποφόρησεν
etropophorēsen
GROWS FROM
τρόπος + φορέω (tropos, way or manner + phoreō, bear or carry)
To bear or carry in relation to someone’s way or manner.
The verb joins the people’s ways to the act of bearing them. “Suffered” names the strain of that endurance, while the compound keeps the image of God bearing their ways close at hand.
ALSO GROWS
tropos: Way, manner, or disposition.
τρόπος
This shows what is being borne: the people’s ways, not merely their physical presence.
phoreō: To bear or carry.
φορέω
This carrying sense makes endurance an active bearing of the people through the wilderness.
ἐρήμῳ
erēmō
GROWS FROM
ἐρημ-
erēm-
Deserted, solitary, or uninhabited.
“wilderness” in this verse is erēmō. The word names a place marked by emptiness, yet the verse locates God’s bearing there. Care is present within the desolation, not only after it passes.
ALSO GROWS
erēmia: Wilderness or desert place.
ἐρημία
The same desolate setting appears as a place people pass through, not a place where care has vanished.
erēmoō: To make desolate or lay waste.
ἐρημόω
This branch makes the root’s force of emptied-out desolation plain, sharpening the contrast with God’s presence in the wilderness.
THE PATTERN
God’s presence can bear people through a prolonged wilderness while their ways remain difficult.
And in the wilderness, where thou hast seen how that the LORD thy God bare thee, as a man doth bear his son, in all the way that ye went, until ye came into this place.Yea, forty years didst thou sustain them in the wilderness, so that they lacked nothing; their clothes waxed not old, and their feet swelled not.Then Jesus answered and said, O faithless and perverse generation, how long shall I be with you? how long shall I suffer you? bring him hither to me.THE THREAD
And in the wilderness, where thou hast seen how that the LORD thy God bare thee, as a man doth bear his son, in all the way that ye went, until ye came into this place.Both verses use the same Greek word for wilderness, while Deuteronomy makes the bearing image explicit: the LORD carries the people as a father bears his son. That shared setting opens Acts’s “suffering their manners” onto a deeper possibility: enduring a people is also carrying them through the wilderness.
Read the SDV Bible.
Every verse has a Deep Dive in the app.
The iPhone Bible app with the Selah Decoded Version.
Does something in this reading look wrong? Tell us