What Does Acts 15:16 Mean?

(16) **After this I will return.**—It is a fact not without interest that the prophet from whom these words are taken (Amos 9:11-12) had been already quoted by Stephen (Acts 7:42). Those who then listened to him had, we may believe, been led to turn to the writings of Amos, and to find in them meanings which had hitherto been latent. The fact that the inference drawn from the passage mainly turns on a clause in which the LXX. version, which St. James quotes, differs from the Hebrew, shows, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that the discussion must have been conducted in Greek, and not in Hebrew. At first this may appear strange in a council held at Jerusalem, but the trial of Stephen presents a precedent (see Note on Acts 7:1); and it is obvious that in a debate which chiefly affected the interests of Greeks, and at which many of them, and of the Hellenistic Jews, were likely to be present, the use of that language, both in the debate and the decree in which it resulted, was almost a matter of necessity. Both languages were probably equally familiar to the inhabitants of Jerusalem. (See Note on Acts 22:2.) The quotation suggests, perhaps implies, a fuller interpretation than is given in the summary of St. James’s speech. It assumes that the “tabernacle of David,” which to human eyes had been lying as in ruins, was being rebuilt by Christ, the Son of David, that He was doing the work which, in the prophecy, Jehovah claimed as His.