Acts 9:37

Acts 9:37. Whom when they had washed. Maimonides, quoted by Gloag, says: ‘It is the custom in Israel, about the dead and their burial, that when any one is dead, they shut his eyes and wash his body.' The practice of ‘washing the dead' was common among the Greeks and the Romans (see Virgil, Æneid, vi. 219). Wordsworth calls attention to this account of the dead Dorcas, being the third instance in this book of reference to the decencies of Christian burial. St. Chrysostom, he goes on to say, contrasts the quietness of this laying out of Dorcas with the great lamentation over Stephen (chap. Acts 8:2). Death, the followers of Jesus had now learnt to regard with greater calmness and joy. See St. Paul's reproof of immoderate grief for the dead in his earliest Epistle (1 Thessalonians 4:13-18) .

They laid in an upper chamber, where the body of the holy dead might rest quietly till Peter came. The message of Acts 9:38, ‘desiring him that he would not delay to come to them,' tells us that the disciples of Joppa hoped much from Peter; they certainly had some dim expectation that the great wonder-working friend of Christ would, like Elijah or Elisha among their fathers, or that far greater One than Elijah or Elisha, whom some of them perhaps had seen, be able to restore to them their loved saint who had been setting so fair and bright an example to the Church at Joppa.