Acts 16:23

Acts 16:23. And commanded to beat them. Acts 16:23. And when they had laid many stripes upon them. Literally, ‘to beat them with rods.' The custom was with the Romans to inflict the blows with rods upon the naked body. In his sad catalogue of the sufferings he had endured for his Master's dear sake (2 Corinthians 11:25), Paul relates how ‘thrice he was beaten with rods.' This Philippi experience was one of the occasions. He endured here, we are told, many stripes, there being in the stern Roman practice no such merciful restriction as that existing in the law of Moses: ‘Of the Jews five times received I forty stripes save one'(2 Corinthians 11:24); and see for the merciful restriction, Deuteronomy 25:3. Hurried and excited by the popular tumult, the arrest, punishment, and subsequent rigorous imprisonment was ordered and carried out with such haste and passion that the plea of Roman citizenship urged with such force by the prisoners on the following day was not listened to even if made.