Philip Schaff's Popular Commentary (4 vols)

Acts 12:21

Acts 12:21. And upon a set day Herod, arrayed in royal apparel, sat upon his throne, and made an oration unto them. Some fifty years before, Herod the Great, grandfather of the present king, had established a festival in honour of the Roman Cæsar, to be observed every five years (Quinquennalia).

This festival was kept in the month of August in the year 44: the king had appointed the second day of the festival to receive the Tyrian ambassadors, and to convey to them his gracious assurance of favour and pardon. Josephus, whose graphic account of the incident well supplements the brief stern summary of the ‘Acts,' tells us that on that morning of the 2d August the king entered the vast, crowded theatre of Cæsarea, clothed in a magnificent dress of silver tissue; the sun's rays fell on the royal robes of silver, and the eyes of the beholders were dazzled with the brightness which surrounded the monarch. Herod then from his throne spoke to the assembled multitude, the majority of whom were idolaters, Cæsarea was almost exclusively a Gentile city. Courtly voices among the crowd cried aloud that the monarch who stood before them in all his magnificence was no man, but a god; and the crowd, dazzled with the brilliancy of his appearance, took up the shout, saying, ‘It is the voice of a god and not of a man;' and the king, whose pride had been that he belonged to the idol-abhorring Hebrew people, was well pleased with the impious homage. While listening approvingly to this blasphemous flattery, the king suddenly looked up and saw an owl sitting on a rope above his head, and immediately understood that the bird was the messenger to him of evil tidings (an old prediction he had heard at Rome had warned him that the appearance of this bird would betoken grave evil to him). He fell into a deep melancholy, and very soon was seized with agonizing pain in his bowels: he then said to the audience, ‘I whom you called a god am commanded now to depart this life;' and the pain becoming more violent, he was carried into his palace, where he lingered in extreme suffering for five days and then expired. It was in the midst of the impious shouts of flattery that the writer of the ‘Acts' says ‘the angel of the Lord smote him, because he gave not God the glory.' The Holy Ghost in the sacred record of the ‘Acts' simply confirms the historical account written by a hand friendly to Herod but hostile to the Christian cause; but while confirming the record of the historian, the writer of the ‘Acts' discloses to us the invisible agency by which the great events related were produced.

After the death of King Herod, the crowds who shouted their impious praises of him on the day of the festival openly rejoiced over his death, heaping cowardly insults on his mourning daughters.

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Philip Schaff's Popular Commentary (4 vols)

Acts 12:21

Old Testament

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