Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Acts · About this commentary
Bread before dawn, and every soul ashore
Acts 27:33-44
33 While the day was coming on, Paul begged them all to take some food, saying, “Today is the fourteenth day that you wait and continue fasting, having taken nothing. · WEB
The prisoner takes charge of a wrecked ship by handing out breakfast, and the promise about the lives is kept down to the last man.
While the day is coming on, Paul does the least dramatic thing available and the most useful. He begged them all to take some food, pointing out that this is the fourteenth day they have gone without eating properly. His reason is practical: this is for your safety. In a few hours every one of them will have to swim or cling to wreckage, and starving men drown.
The promise is repeated in a homely form — not a hair will perish from any of your heads — and then he does something that is described with unusual care. When he had said this and had taken bread, he gave thanks to God in the presence of all; then he broke it and began to eat.
The words are the ones used of the meals that mattered most in the Gospels, and it is worth being careful about what is claimed. This is a company of soldiers, sailors and prisoners on a sinking grain ship, and nothing suggests a service was held. What is recorded is that a Jewish believer said grace at breakfast, out loud, in front of everyone, at a moment when there was no obvious reason for gratitude. That is the whole of it, and it is enough to change the room: Then they all cheered up, and they also took food.
The head count is given here rather than earlier, which is how a passenger would give it — you learn the number when everyone comes on deck. In all, we were two hundred seventy-six souls on the ship.
Then the wheat goes overboard. The cargo that the voyage existed for, that the owner had risked the season for, is thrown into the sea to raise the hull for the run at the beach. Everything that made the trip worth making has now been discarded to save the people making it.
The beaching is described by someone who watched it: a bay with a beach they did not recognize, anchors cast off, rudder ropes untied, the foresail hoisted to drive her in. And then it goes wrong — coming to a place where two seas met, they ran the vessel aground. The bow sticks fast and the stern begins to break up under the surf.
The last danger is not the sea. The soldiers' counsel was to kill the prisoners, so that none of them would swim out and escape. It is a rational proposal by the standards of the service, since a guard answered with his life for an escape, as sixteen men in Jerusalem had discovered.
What saves them all is one man's regard for one of them: the centurion, desiring to save Paul, stopped them. Julius, who let him visit friends at Sidon, now overrides his own men, and every prisoner on that ship lives because of how the officer felt about one of them.
His instructions are sensible and unglamorous — swimmers first, the rest on planks and pieces of the ship. So they all escaped safely to the land. Two hundred and seventy-six, exactly as promised, by cargo jettisoned, a boat cut adrift, a meal eaten at dawn and a centurion's decision.
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