Biblion Bible Commentary
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Pentecost: wind, fire and other tongues
Acts 2:1-4
1 Now when the day of Pentecost had come, they were all with one accord in one place. · WEB
The promised power arrives on a feast day, in signs everyone present could see and hear, and it lands on all of them without distinction.
The day is named before anything happens, and the name matters. Pentecost is the feast of weeks, kept fifty days after the offering of the firstfruits of the barley harvest, and it is itself a harvest festival — the day the first loaves from the new wheat were brought in Leviticus 23:15–17. The Spirit is given on the day Israel had been bringing God the beginning of a crop, and three thousand people are gathered in before the sun goes down.
It is also, of all the annual feasts, the one that guarantees a crowd from everywhere. The signs about to occur will occur in front of pilgrims from a dozen language areas, which is not incidental to what the signs will be.
The two phenomena are described with care, and in both cases the writer reaches for a comparison rather than an identification. There came a sound like the rushing of a mighty wind, and tongues like fire appeared. It is not stated that wind blew or that anything burned. Something was heard that resembled wind and something was seen that resembled flame, and the caution of the wording is the mark of a report rather than a legend.
Both images have a history. The breath and the wind are the same word in Hebrew and in Greek alike, so a sound of wind at the giving of the Spirit is a visible pun on what is being given. Fire is where God has appeared to Moses, to Israel at Sinai, and over the tabernacle, and it is what John said this baptism would involve Luke 3:16.
What happens to the distribution of the fire is the point most easily missed. The tongues were distributed to them, and one sat on each of them. Not one flame over the group, and not one over Peter. The Spirit is given individually, to every person in the room, and the room includes the women named in the previous paragraph. Whatever else Pentecost establishes, it establishes that this endowment is not concentrated in an office.
Then they speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them the ability. The verb governs the whole scene: they do the speaking and he supplies the capacity. Nothing here is trance or dictation. Men who could not speak Parthian speak it, deliberately, and know that they are doing it.
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