Acts 1:18

“Now this man obtained a field with the reward of his iniquity; and falling headlong (or ‘prone'), he burst asunder in the midst, and all his bowels gushed out.”

Among the Jews, when a man had entered into a contract from which he wanted to withdraw for conscience sake, and the other party refused to accept the money back, a means was provided by which he could take whatever was involved to the Temple and officially hand it back there. By that means he was seen as exonerated from guilt for what he had done. And that is what Judas had done (Matthew 27:3). But there were limits as to what contracts could be so revoked, and Judas' money was not acceptable to the Temple because it was blood money. It could not therefore be taken into the Temple treasury.

So the money remained Judas' until it was decided what to do with it. The authorities then met and decided that it should therefore be used for a non-sacred purpose, by assisting Gentiles (Jews could not be helped with blood money). So Judas' money was used to obtain the potter's field to bury strangers in, and in essence Judas ‘obtained the field'.

We learn here also more detail as to the inglorious death of Judas. The full story of what had happened had now clearly become known. When a man hangs himself his greatest problem is to ensure a quick death, and it was regularly recognised that this could be achieved by a sharp drop once the rope was around the neck. Judas had probably chosen some high spot (a cliff or tree) within the land bought with his money (indicating his clinically depressed state) from which to carry out his suicide (Matthew 27:5), and putting the rope round his neck had leaped to his death. It would appear from Peter's description here that this had resulted in his being ‘burst asunder so that all his bowels gushed out'. We need not take this too literally. This could easily have happened, for example, if the rope broke and he fell onto rocks below (so Augustine), or if in the fall he swung against something jagged or pointed. All we finally know is that he hung himself and finished with his stomach burst open. (Papias is cited by Apollinarius as indicating that there was something particularly gruesome about his death, and he regularly talked about such things with the ageing Apostles). This gruesome death would be seen as accentuating his guilt. It probably reminded Peter of another who had rebelled against the Davidic house whose bowels had also gushed out (in LXX also eksechuthe), a fitting end to a traitor (2 Samuel 20:10), which would further serve to explain why he details it here.