Tool Beta
The Gods of the Bible
Every named divine being in Scripture, what the text calls it, and what the ancient world thought it was.
Artemis of the Ephesians
A local goddess whose souvenir trade started a riot against Paul.
Acts 19:24-35, in every translation this tool compares.
A riot starts over Paul, and it starts in the souvenir trade. The silversmiths making her shrines were losing money. The city clerk calms everyone by appealing to the image that fell from heaven, a stock claim made for a good many statues.
The riot is economic before it is theological, since Demetrius's silversmiths are losing a trade. The city clerk calms the crowd by appealing to the image that fell from heaven, using diopetes, "fallen from Zeus" (Acts 19:35), a stock claim for statues believed to be made by the gods and not by human hands, which was the very point Paul had been attacking. DDD notes that about twenty-five other gods were worshipped in Ephesus at the time. The riot wasn't provoked by monotheism threatening polytheism in general, then, but by Paul's claim that a handmade object can't be a god.
G735, 5 occ
The Ephesian Artemis is a local cult figure and not the huntress of classical Greek myth. She absorbed an older Anatolian mother and fertility goddess, possibly named Upis, and her temple, one of the Seven Wonders, doubled as the city's bank and a place of asylum, so the silversmiths' riot was also a defense of Ephesus's financial center. Her cult title Megale, "Great," behind the crowd's "great is Artemis of the Ephesians" (Acts 19:27-28), set her above every other Ephesian deity in rank without making her the only one.
- Acts 19:24-35
- DDD s.v. "Artemis," 91-96
