Biblion Bible Commentary
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The viper at Malta, and the fever at Publius's house
Acts 28:1-10
1 When we had escaped, then they learned that the island was called Malta. · WEB
Islanders decide Paul is a murderer, then that he is a god, and are wrong twice — and the winter turns into three months of healing.
They come ashore on Melita , the island the English translations generally call Malta, and the first thing recorded about the people there is their kindness. The natives showed us uncommon kindness; for they kindled a fire and received us all, because of the present rain and because of the cold.
The word translated natives means those who speak another language — outsiders, in the Greek way of dividing the world. They are the least civilized people in the book by that reckoning, and they light a fire in the rain for two hundred and seventy-six soaked strangers. The narrative notices.
Paul gathers sticks, which is the detail worth holding: an apostle, a prisoner and a man in his fifties collecting firewood with everyone else. A viper comes out of the bundle with the heat and fastens on his hand.
The islanders' interpretation is instant and confident. No doubt this man is a murderer, whom, though he has escaped from the sea, yet Justice has not allowed to live. They have a theology, and it is a tidy one: wrongdoing is repaid, escape is temporary, and misfortune identifies the guilty. It is also the reasoning Job's friends used, and it is wrong here for the same reason it was wrong there.
He shakes the creature into the fire and is unharmed. They wait for him to swell or drop dead, and when nothing happens they changed their minds and said that he was a god.
The two verdicts are the chapter's quiet joke and its serious point. Within an hour the same people have judged him a murderer under divine sentence and a deity, on the same evidence, reversed. A view of God built on reading circumstances will produce whatever the last hour supplied, and it will be held with total confidence both times. The text records no sermon correcting them; the reader is simply shown the pair of conclusions and left to weigh them.
The chief man of the island, Publius, receives the party and entertains them for three days — a considerable act, given the numbers. His father is ill with fever and dysentery, and Paul goes in to him, prayed, and laying his hands on him, healed him. The prayer comes first and is mentioned first, which keeps the healing where it belongs.
The result is that the whole island comes: the rest also who had diseases in the island came and were cured. What began with a shipwrecked prisoner picking up sticks ends with three months of open medical and spiritual traffic through the house of the island's leading citizen.
And the closing note is practical. They also honored us with many honors; and when we sailed, they put on board the things that we needed. A company that arrived with nothing but what they swam in leaves provisioned for the voyage. Nothing is said about a church on Malta, and nothing about baptisms. What the account records is a winter in which a great many people were healed and the strangers were sent on well supplied.
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