Biblion Bible Commentary
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The road to Gaza: how can I, unless someone explains?
Acts 8:26-40
26 Then an angel of the Lord spoke to Philip, saying, “Arise, and go toward the south to the way that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza. This is a desert.” · WEB
A man excluded by law from the assembly reads Isaiah on a desert road, and the passage he is stuck on is the one that explains everything.
The direction comes from an angel and makes no sense on its face. Philip is in the middle of a citywide awakening, and he is sent south, to the road that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza — and the writer adds three words: This is a desert. A successful evangelist is moved from a full city to an empty road, and told nothing about why.
The man he finds is described in unusual detail. An Ethiopian, a eunuch, an official of great authority under the queen, in charge of all her treasure, who had come to Jerusalem to worship. Everything in that list is in tension with something else. He has power and wealth, and he has traveled perhaps fifteen hundred miles to worship at a temple that could not fully receive him: the law excluded a man in his condition from the assembly Deuteronomy 23:1. He went anyway, and he is going home with a scroll.
He is reading aloud, as ancient readers did, which is why Philip can hear him from the roadside. The Spirit says Go near, and join yourself to this chariot, and Philip runs. The question he asks is a good one and not an aggressive one: Do you understand what you are reading?
The answer is the most disarming sentence in the chapter. How can I, unless someone explains it to me? A treasury official, literate, wealthy and devout, states plainly that he needs help, and invites a stranger who has been running beside his chariot to sit down with him.
The passage is Isaiah's suffering servant: led as a sheep to the slaughter, silent before the shearer, humiliated, justice denied him, his life taken from the earth. And the eunuch's question is exactly the right one — Who is the prophet talking about? About himself, or about someone else? Philip begins from that Scripture and preaches Jesus.
It is worth seeing how much the chosen passage gives him. A man unjustly condemned in a proceeding where justice was taken away; who did not defend himself; who was killed. Everything Philip needs is on the page in front of the man asking, and the last thing Isaiah says of this servant, a few lines further on, is that he will see his offspring and prolong his days. And a few chapters later that same prophet promises the eunuch who holds to the covenant a name better than sons and daughters Isaiah 56:3–5 — which is what a man with no descendants and no place in the assembly had traveled to Jerusalem in hope of.
They come to water and the eunuch asks the question himself: Behold, here is water. What is keeping me from being baptized? Coming from him, it is not rhetorical. He has spent his life being kept from things. The answer, in the event, is nothing at all — the chariot stops, they both go down into the water, and he is baptized on the strength of a single conversation.
Some English Bibles carry a further verse here, in which Philip requires a confession of faith and the eunuch makes one; the oldest copies do not have it, and the account reads continuously without it. What the narrative gives is a man who asked what stood in his way and found that nothing did.
Then Philip is taken away and the eunuch went on his way rejoicing — with no church, no teacher, and no follow-up, carrying a scroll he can now read. Philip is found at Azotus and preaches up the coast to Caesarea. Neither man is told what became of the other.
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