Acts 9:7

Acts 9:7. The men who journeyed with him stood speechless. In chap. Acts 26:14 Paul tells King Agrippa how ‘we were all fallen to the earth;' here, in the narrative of Luke, we read how ‘they stood speechless.' The words ‘stood speechless' do not signify apparently that they stood erect, in distinction from lying prostrate, but that, overpowered with what they saw and heard, they were fixed, rooted as it were to the spot. It must also be borne in mind, that the fact, which it was especially desired that the reader or hearer of this narration should be impressed with, was not that the ‘men stood' or were ‘fallen to the ground,' this detail is utterly unimportant, but that they were speechless and confounded.

Hearing a voice. In chap. Acts 22:9, Paul, speaking to the people from the Temple stairs, relates ‘how they heard not the voice of Him that spake to me;' while here, in Luke's narrative of the same event, we read of the companions of Paul ‘hearing a voice.' Of the many solutions that have been proposed to reconcile this apparent contradiction, the best is that adopted by Baumgarten, Lange, Wordsworth, Gloag, etc., which explains Luke's account in this chap. 9 thus:

The companions of Saul heard the sound of the words, while in Paul's account (chap. Acts 22:9) ‘his companions did not understand what was spoken;' or in other words, Saul received a clear impression of what was being spoken, whilst those with him received only an indefinite one. Once in the Gospel history a similar phenomenon is recorded by St. John 12:28-29, when there came a voice from heaven answering Jesus: ‘I have both glorified it, and will glorify it again.' Three classes of hearers are here spoken of: those who believed recognised the glorious voice and understood the words; others with less faith and love said it was an angel which spoke to Him; while to the multitude in general the voice was only as though it thundered.