Acts 17:26

“And he hath made of one every nation of men for to dwell,” R.V., so also A.V. takes ἐποίησε separately from κατοικεῖν, not “caused to dwell”; ἐποίησε, cf. Acts 17:24, he made, i.e., created of one; see Hackett's note. κατοικεῖν : infinitive of purpose. ἐξ ἑνὸς (αἵματος), see critical note. Rendall renders “from one father” as the substantive really understood, the idea of offspring being implied by ἐξ, cf. Hebrews 2:11; Hebrews 11:12 : Ramsay, “of one nature, every race of men,” etc. Such teaching has often been supposed to be specially directed against the boast of the Athenians that they were themselves αὐτόχθονες (so recently Zöckler, and see instances in Wetstein, cf. e.g., Arist., Vesp., 1076; Cicero, Pro Flacco, xxvi.); but whilst the Apostle's words were raised above any such special polemic, yet he may well have had in mind the characteristic pride of his hearers, whilst asserting a truth which cut at the root of all national pride engendered by polytheism on the one hand, by a belief in a god of this nation or of that, or of a philosophic pride engendered by a hard Stoicism on the other. When Renan and others speak of Christianity extending its hand to the philosophy of Greece in the beautiful theory which it proclaimed of the moral unity of the human race (Saint Paul, p. 197) it must not be forgotten that Rome and not Greece manifested the perfection of Pagan ethics, and that, even so, the sayings of a Seneca or an Epictetus wanted equally with those of a Zeno “a lifting power in human life”. The cosmopolitanism of a Seneca no less than that of a Zeno failed; the higher thoughts of good men of a citizenship, not of Ephesus or elsewhere, but of the world, which were stirring in the towns where St. Paul preached, all these failed, Die Heraklitischen Briefe, p. 91 (Bernays); it was not given to the Greek or to the Roman, but to the Jew, separated though he was from every other nation, to safeguard the truth of the unity of mankind, and to proclaim the realisation of that truth through the blood of a Crucified Jew (Alford). On the Stoic cosmopolitanism see amongst recent writers G. H. Rendall, Marcus Antoninus, Introd., pp.88, 118, 137 (1898). ἐπὶ πᾶν τὸ πρόσωπον τῆς γῆς, cf. Genesis 2:6; Genesis 11:8, etc.; Winer-Moulton, xviii., 4, cf. in Latin, maris facies, Æn., v., 768, naturæ vultus, Ovid, Met., i., 6. ὁρίσας προτεταγ. καιροὺς : if we read προστεταγ. see critical note, “having determined their appointed seasons,” R.V. καιρ. not simply seasons in the sense used in addressing the people of Lystra, Acts 14:17, as if St. Paul had in mind only the course of nature as divinely ordered, and not also a divine philosophy of history. If the word was to be taken with κατοικίας it would have the article and χρόνος would be more probably used, cf. also πρόσταγμα, Jeremiah 5:24, Sir 39:16. It is natural to think of the expression of our Lord Himself, Luke 21:24, καιροὶ ἐθνῶν, words which may well have suggested to St. Paul his argument in Romans 9-11, but the thought is a more general one. In speaking thus, before such an audience, of a Providence in the history of mankind, assigning to them their seasons and their dwellings, the thought of the Stoic πρόνοια may well have been present to his mind; but if so it was by way of contrast (“sed non a Stoicis Paulo erat discenda πρόνοια,” Blass, in loco). St. Paul owed his doctrine of Providence to no school of philosophy, but to the sacred Scriptures of his nation, which had proclaimed by the mouth of lawgiver, patriarch, psalmist, and prophet alike, that the Most High had given to the nations their inheritance, that it was He Who had spread them abroad and brought them in, that it was His to change the times and the seasons, Deuteronomy 32:8; Job 12:23; Psalms 115:16; Daniel 2:21, see further the note on πρόνοια, Wisdom of Solomon Acts 14:3 (Acts 17:2), Speaker's Commentary (Farrar). τὰς ὁροθεσίας τῆς κατοικίας : the first noun is not found elsewhere either in classical or biblical Greek, but cf. Blass, Gram., p. 69. κατοικία : only here in N.T., but frequent in LXX; found also in Polyb., of a dwelling; so in Strabo, of a settlement, a colony. Here, as in the former part of the verse, we need not limit the words to the assertion of the fact that God has given to various nations their different geographical bounds of mountain, river or sea; as we recognise the influence exerted upon the morale of the inhabitants of a country by their physical surroundings, St. Paul's words teach us to see also in these conditions “the works of the Lord” the words of the most scientific observer perhaps of Palestine, Karl Ritter, are these: “Nature and the course of history show that here, from the beginning onwards there cannot be talk of any chance”: G. A. Smith, Historical Geography of the Holy Land, pp. 112, 113, and 302, 303 ff.; Curtius, “Paulus in Athen.,” Gesammelte Abhandlungen, ii., 531, 536.