Acts 18:6

Acts 18:6. And when they opposed themselves, and blasphemed. The more than usually violent opposition of the Jews which appears from these words, and also from the apostle's sad, reproachful allusion in the First Epistle, written about this time, to Thessalonica (1 Thessalonians 2:14), was no doubt stirred up by the intense earnestness of Paul in his work after the arrival of Silas and Timotheus, when he was ‘pressed and constrained by the word.'

He shook his raiment. That is, he shook the very dust out of his garments a similarly symbolical action to the one related in chap. Acts 13:51, in Pisidian Antioch, when he shook off the dust of his feet. In each of these dramatic actions, so common among oriental peoples, Paul desired to show his complete renunciation of those Jews ‘displeasing to God, and enemies to all mankind,' as he terms them in his Thessalonian letter; not even a particle of dust might remain on his feet or garments as a bond of union (see the direction of the Master in such cases, Matthew 10:14).

Your blood be upon your own heads; I am clean. I am pure, he would say, free from guilt and responsibility, although you, in your blind perverseness, perish. The terms of this terrible expression would be well known to the Jewish Rabbis and leaders at Corinth; they were from Ezekiel 33:4.