Acts 24:24 - Ellicott's Commentary On The Whole Bible

Felix came with his wife Drusilla. — She was, as has been said (see Note on Acts 23:26), the daughter of the first Herod Agrippa and the sister of the second. In her name, the diminutive of Drusus, and borne also by a sister of Caligula’s, we trace the early connection of her father with that emperor. She was but six years of age at the time of her father’s death. She had been married at an early age to Azizus, king of Emesa, who had become a proselyte, and accepted circumcision. Felix fell in love with her, and employed the services of a Jewish magician named Simon, whom some writers have identified with the sorcerer of Samaria (see Note on Acts 8:9), to seduce her from her husband. By her marriage with Felix she had a son named Agrippa, who perished in an eruption of Vesuvius (Jos. Ant. xix. 7; xx. 5). It follows from the facts of her life that she could scarcely have been altogether unacquainted with the history of the new society. She must have known of the death of James and the imprisonment of Peter (Acts 12). She may have connected her father’s tragic end at Cæsarea with the part he had taken in persecuting the faith of which one of the chief preachers was now brought before her. It would seem, from her being with her husband at these interviews, that she was eager to learn more of “the faith in Christ.” Felix, too, seems to have been willing at first to listen. This new development of his wife’s religion, presenting, as it did, a higher aspect than that of the priests and elders of Jerusalem, was for him, at least, an object of more than common interest. The procurator and his wife were apparently in the first stage of an earnest inquiry which might have led to a conversion.