Acts 2:24

“Whom God raised up, having loosed the pangs of death, because it was not possible that he should be kept captive by it.”

But His death had not been the end. For God had raised Him up, and had released Him from the pangs of death. Indeed it had not been possible for Him to be held by them because the Scriptures had already declared that He would be raised from the dead. There may also here be a recognition by Peter even at this stage that the nature of Jesus was such that death could not hold Him. He was the Holy One, the Lord of Life. The Scripture he quotes is Psalms 16:8. This psalm was a Davidic Psalm and therefore applied to all the faithful scions of David. (They were sung century by century precisely for this reason). In it David had expressed his confidence that for him death would not be the end. And each following ‘David' who was faithful could express the same confidence. How much more then was this true of the greater David Who had now come.

‘The pangs of death.' Death is regularly in Scripture seen as an enemy, as something to be avoided, as something painful and abhorrent which is why the defeat of death is regularly described in terms of freedom from sorrow and bondage (Isaiah 25:8; Isa 26:19; 1 Corinthians 15:54; Hebrews 2:14; Revelation 21:4)