Acts 2:5

Dwelling at Jerusalem. The question has been raised as to how the foreigners enumerated in vs. 9-11 may be considered to have been “dwelling” at Jerusalem. Two explanations are possible. The Jews mentioned here may have come to the city of their fathers for a protracted stay, perhaps on business; or perhaps, like Paul, to study (ch. 22:3), or some may have been men in retirement from active life. On the other hand, it is not impossible to understand their “dwelling” to indicate a temporary stay, particularly in view of the fact that some are called “dwellers in Mesopotamia” (ch. 2:9) and others, “strangers of Rome” (v. 10).

Devout. The word is used of Simeon (Luke 2:25). The primary meaning is one of circumspection, the disposition that handles sacred things carefully, devoutly, worshipfully. With this meaning it could include proselytes as well as Jews by birth. The expression “out of every nation under heaven” makes such inclusion a necessity. The word appears again in Acts 8:2.

Out of every nation. Herod Agripa II, in his famous speech made two generations later in an effort to keep the Jews from rebelling against the Romans, declared that “there is not a people in the world which does not contain a portion of our race” (Josephus War ii. 16.4 [399]), and James addressed his inspired epistle “to the twelve tribes which are scattered abroad” (James 1:1). This dispersion of the Jews was due primarily to the great captivities they had suffered: (1) the ten tribes to Assyria and Media in 722 B.C. (2 Kings 17:6); (2) the tribe of Judah to Babylonia, in three separate transportations beginning in 605 (see on 2 Chron. 36:1-21; Jer. 52:1-30; Dan. 1:1-7); (3) the great numbers to Egypt by the Macedonian Ptolemy Soter (Josephus Antiquities xii. 1.1 [6, 7]). In addition to the Jews who were dispersed by the captivities, thousands of them were lured to every part of the world by commercial activities.