Acts Chapter 17 verse 16 Holy Bible
Now while Paul waited for them at Athens, his spirit was provoked within him as he beheld the city full of idols.
read chapter 17 in ASV
Now while Paul was waiting for them at Athens, his spirit was troubled, for he saw all the town full of images of the gods.
read chapter 17 in BBE
But in Athens, while Paul was waiting for them, his spirit was painfully excited in him seeing the city given up to idolatry.
read chapter 17 in DARBY
Now while Paul waited for them at Athens, his spirit was stirred in him, when he saw the city wholly given to idolatry.
read chapter 17 in KJV
read chapter 17 in WBT
Now while Paul waited for them at Athens, his spirit was provoked within him as he saw the city full of idols.
read chapter 17 in WEB
and Paul waiting for them in Athens, his spirit was stirred in him, beholding the city wholly given to idolatry,
read chapter 17 in YLT
Pulpit Commentary
Pulpit CommentaryVerse 16. - Provoked within for stirred in, A.V. (παρωξύνετο: see Acts 15:29, note); as he beheld for when he saw, A.V.; full of idols for wholly given to idolatry, A.V. The Greek κατείδωλος occurs only here, either in the New Testament or elsewhere. But the analogy of ether words similarly compounded fixes the meaning "full of idols" - a description fully borne out by Pausanias and Xenophon and others (Steph., 'Thesaur.;' Meyer, etc.).
Ellicott's Commentary
Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers(16) His spirit was stirred in him.--The verb is the root of the noun from which we get our "paroxysm," and which is translated by "sharp contention" in Acts 15:39. Athens, glorying now, as it had done in the days of Sophocles (?dip. Col. 1008), in its devotion to the gods, presented to him, even after seeing Tarsus and Antioch, a new aspect. The city was "full of idols;" Hermes-busts at every corner, statues and altars in the atrium or court-yard of every house, temples and porticos and colonnades, all presenting what was to him the same repulsive spectacle. He looked on the Theseus and the Ilissus, and the friezes of the Centaurs and Lapithae on the Parthenon, as we look on them in our museums, but any sense of art-beauty which he may have had (and it was probably, in any case, but weak) was over-powered by his horror that men should bow down and worship what their own hands had made. The beauty of form which we admire in the Apollo or the Aphrodite, the Mercury or the Faun, would be to him, in its unveiled nakedness, a thing to shudder at. He knew too well to what that love of sensuous beauty had led in Greek and Roman life (Romans 1:24-27), when it had thrown aside what, to a Jew, were not only the natural instincts of purity, but the sanctions of a divine command (Genesis 9:22).