Acts 12:23

The angel of the Lord smote him. — The intervention of the angel is obviously regarded by St. Luke as the only adequate explanation at once of the death of the persecutor and of the escape of his victim, and in the former he recognised not only what has been called the irony of history, or an instance of the law of Nemesis, bringing down the haughty in the very hour of their triumph, but a direct chastisement for an act of impiety.

Because he gave not God the glory. — The words probably mean something more than that he did not ascribe to God the praise which was due to Him, and Him only. To “give God the glory” was a phrase always connected with the confession of sin and weakness, as in Joshua 7:19. (See Note on John 9:24.)

He was eaten of worms. — The specific form of the disease is not named by Josephus, and St. Luke’s precision in describing it may fairly be regarded as characteristic of his calling. The form of the disease, probably of the nature of phtheiriasis, or the morbus pedicularis, from its exceptionally loathsome character, had always been regarded as of the nature of a divine chastisement. The more memorable instances of it recorded in history are those of Pheretimo of Cyrene (Herod. iv. 205), Sylla, Antiochus the Great (2Ma. 9:2), Herod the Great (Jos. Ant. xvii. 8), and Maximinus, among the persecutors of the Church (Euseb. viii. 16; ix. 10, 11; Lactant, De mort. Persecut. c. 33). The death of Agrippa took place A.D. 44, in the seventh year of his reign, and at the age of fifty-three.