Acts 21:27

Acts 21:27. And when the seven days were almost ended. Or, literally rendered, ‘were on the point of being completed;' that is, when the seven days, ‘the days of purification,' announced to the priests as the time to which the vow of the four Nazarites would extend, and also the period of the apostle's sharing in that consecration, were coming to an end.

The Jews which were of Asia, when they saw him in the temple, stirred up all the people, and laid hands on him. The Jews who had come up as pilgrims to the Holy City from Proconsular Asia, of which Ephesus was the capital. Paul, we know, had spent some three years in Ephesus and Asia, and was well known to the Jews there, by many of whom he had been bitterly opposed and persecuted. No doubt many of these Asian Jews were from Ephesus, the chief city, and recognised Trophimus their fellow-townsman (Acts 21:29). These Jews had been watching Paul, with strange excited interest, as he passed in and out of the temple courts with the marks of his Nazarite's vow upon him, and at length they saw him in company with a Gentile (Trophimus) well known to them. He was, no doubt, in the outer court of the temple, where aliens might walk and gaze unhindered; and these excited men at once concluded Paul was about to proceed with the stranger into those sacred precincts reserved strictly for the children of Israel, and at once raised the cry, charging him with the crime of profaning the Holy Place.