Philip Schaff's Popular Commentary (4 vols)

Acts 27:38

Acts 27:38. They lightened the ship. This would require great and active labour; and the food they had taken was an essential condition of their doing it effectually. The cargo was now of no use, as it was known that the ship would be lost; and there were two reasons why it was important to throw it overboard the ship was to be run aground, and it was desirable to make it draw as little water as possible. But, moreover, the ship having been for many days on the starboard tack, it is probable that the cargo had shifted, and that the vessel was heeling over to the port side. In cargoes of grain, unless the grain is packed in sacks, such displacement is very liable to take place. This very subject has been brought under public attention lately in the English newspapers.

Cast out the wheat into the sea. In the late Professor Blunt's Undesigned Coincidences (p. 326) are some remarks on this subject, which present so good an example of this kind of argument that it is worth while to quote them at length: ‘In the fifth verse we are informed that the vessel into which the centurion removed Paul and the other prisoners at Myra belonged to Alexandria, and was sailing into Italy. From the tenth verse we learn that it was a merchant vessel, for mention is made of its lading, but the nature of the lading is not directly stated. In this verse, at a distance of some thirty verses from the last, we find, by the merest chance, of what its cargo consisted. The freight was naturally enough kept till it could be kept no longer, and then we discover for the first time that it was wheat, the very article which such vessels were accustomed to carry from Egypt to Italy. These notices, so detached from each other, tell a continuous story, but it is not perceived till they are brought together. The circumstances drop out one by one in the course of the narrative, unarranged, unpremeditated, thoroughly accidental; so that the chapter might be read twenty times, and their agreement with one another and with contemporary history be still overlooked.'

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Philip Schaff's Popular Commentary (4 vols)

Acts 27:38

Old Testament

New Testament