Then fell she down straightway at his feet, and yielded up the ghost: and the young men came in, and found her dead, and, carrying her forth, buried her by her husband.
Then fell she down straightway at his feet, and yielded up the ghost: and the young men, х hoi (G3588) neaniskoi (G3495)] - in the sense before explained, though the term is slightly varied,
Came in, and found her dead, and, carrying her forth, buried her by her husband. The later Jews buried before sunset of the day of death. Here again the reader should be on his guard against the tendency to weaken the miraculous character of the judgment that befell this couple; as when Neander would represent it, in the case of Ananias, as the result of the astonishment and terror, produced on him by the detection of his sin and the holy denunciations of a man speaking to his conscience with such divine confidence; and in the case of Sapphira, by the impression of her husband's fate in addition to all this. Even Olshausen would admit that the death might be a natural event, though, in the circumstances, it may be regarded as miraculous. Such comments cannot fail to shake one's confidence in the narrative itself, if he gives any heed to them. No doubt astonishment, terror, and burning shame would be in them like fuel to the flame of divine vengeance; but this is a very different statement from Neander's.