What Does Acts 16:28 Mean in the King James?
But Paul cried with a loud voice, saying, Do thyself no harm: for we are all here.
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
The jailer’s fatal isolation is interrupted by a fact spoken aloud: the whole company is still here.
THE MEANING
At the edge of a fatal act, another voice enters the moment: stop; we are all still here. Fear can make catastrophe feel complete, but the scene holds facts beyond what fear can see. Here, the prisoners’ presence changes what the jailer believes is happening and what he is about to do.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The verse undoes the belief that disaster is already complete and death is the only remaining act: the others are still present, so the jailer’s terror is not the whole reality.
THE ROOT
κακόν
kakon
GROWS FROM
κακ
bad, evil, harmful
The word names harm as something that can be done; it does not name the jailer’s nature. The same root appears in words for doing harm and for malice, showing that the warning interrupts a harmful act before it becomes his next deed.
ALSO GROWS
kakopoieō: do evil or harm
κακοποιέω
This branch makes the root active: harm is something an action can produce, fitting the urgency of Paul’s warning.
kakia: malice, wickedness
κακία
The root can name a quality of evil as well as harm done; here the focus is the specific harm the jailer is about to inflict on himself.
THE PATTERN
When terror narrows a moment to death, a living presence interrupts it by speaking what remains.
And as he lay and slept under a juniper tree, behold, then an angel touched him, and said unto him, Arise and eat.The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit.And when he thus had spoken, he cried with a loud voice, Lazarus, come forth.THE THREAD
Love worketh no ill to his neighbour: therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.“Ill” here is κακόν (kakon), the same Greek word used for “harm” in Acts. Romans places this harm within what love does not enact toward a neighbor; Acts turns the warning toward the self whose life is immediately at risk.
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