Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Acts · About this commentary
Eutychus in the third-story window
Acts 20:7-12
7 On the first day of the week, when the disciples were gathered together to break bread, Paul talked with them, intending to depart on the next day; and continued his speech until midnight. · WEB
A farewell meeting runs past midnight, a boy falls to his death, and the whole account is told with the affection of someone who was in the room.
The setting is a departure. Paul has been in Troas seven days and is leaving in the morning, so the disciples gather and he talks. Intending to depart on the next day; and continued his speech until midnight. Everything in the scene follows from a last night.
The timing has been much discussed and the text supplies the materials for the discussion without settling it. The gathering is on the first day of the week, and it is at night — there are many lamps, and Paul speaks until midnight and then until daybreak. If the day is reckoned as the Scriptures reckon it, from evening to evening, this is the dark hours following the Sabbath; if from midnight, it is a Sunday evening. The English translations divide on nothing here, but the reckoning behind the phrase is genuinely open, and the two readings put the meeting on different nights.
What the passage will not carry is the weight sometimes placed on it. It describes one gathering, held because a departure was imminent, in a book that shows the apostles in synagogues on the Sabbath from the first chapter to the last. Nothing in the sentence establishes a repeating practice, and the reason the evening was recorded at all is not the day but the accident.
A certain young man named Eutychus sat in the window, weighed down with deep sleep. The word for young man covers a boy in his teens. The room is upstairs, crowded, and full of burning lamps consuming the air, and he has taken the window for the coolness. The writer says twice that he was overcome by sleep, and adds, with a candor that has comforted preachers ever since, as Paul spoke still longer.
He falls from the third floor and was taken up dead. The verdict is flat and the writer, who elsewhere records that a crowd merely supposed Paul dead at Lystra, makes no such qualification here.
Paul goes down, falls on him and embraces him — the gesture Elijah and Elisha used over dead children 1 Kings 17:21 2 Kings 4:34 — and says Don't be troubled, for his life is in him. The announcement comes after the act, describing the result rather than predicting it.
Then the most human sequence in the book. Paul goes back upstairs, breaks bread and eats, and had talked with them a long while, even until break of day, and leaves. A boy has been raised from the dead and the meeting simply resumes. There is no service of thanksgiving and no sermon on the miracle; the man had a night left with these people and he used it.
The last verse belongs to the congregation and is the reason the story survives. They brought the boy in alive, and were greatly comforted. Not amazed. Comforted — which is what the people who knew him needed, and what someone in that room remembered decades later.
held with reason What this mark means