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.
The unknown god
An Athenian altar hedging against offending a god nobody could name, which Paul preached from.
Acts 17:23, in every translation this tool compares.
Athens kept an altar hedging against offending a god nobody had named. Paul preaches from it. The practice was real rather than something Luke invented for the scene; travelers were still describing these altars a century later.
Paul takes an Athenian hedge against offending an unnamed deity and preaches from it, and his quotation of Aratus two verses later makes the same move in the other direction. DDD confirms the practice was real and not a Lukan invention. The second-century traveler Pausanias independently records altars "to unknown gods" near the harbor at Phalerum and beside the great altar of Zeus at Olympia, and an older tradition preserved by Diogenes Laertius traces the custom to the sixth century BC, when the seer Epimenides of Cnossos ended a plague in Athens by releasing sheep and building unmarked altars wherever each one lay down, so as not to offend a god whose name the city didn't know.
- Acts 17:23
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- DDD s.v. "Unknown God," 882-884
