110 John C. Poirier 38 Then you are not the Egyptian who recently stirred up a revolt and led the four thousand assassins out into the wilderness?” 39 Paul replied, “I am a Jew, from Tarsus in Cilicia, a citizen of an important city; I beg you, let me speak to the people.” 40 When he had given him permission, Paul stood on the steps and motioned to the people for silence; and when there was a great hush, he addressed them in the Hebrew language, saying: 22,1 “Brothers and fathers, listen to the defense that I now make before you.” 2 When they heard him addressing them in Hebrew, they became even more quiet. . . 23 And while they were shouting, throwing off their cloaks, and toss- ing dust into the air, 24 the tribune directed that he was to be brought into the barracks, and ordered him to be examined by flogging, to find out the reason for this outcry against him. Paul’s decision to address the crowd in τῇ Ἑβραΐδι διαλέκτῳ appears to be tactical. What his tactic was needs to be spelled out, however, since it is often wrongly supposed that he was merely trying to demonstrate his devotion to Jewish practice.7 It is easy to see how the narrative might E.g., D. Marguerat, The First Christian Historian: Writing the “Acts of the Apostles” 7 (Cambridge 2002) 197 correctly observes that Luke is “accumulat[ing] the signs of Paul’s Jewishness” in Acts 22 (cf. 1 Cor 9,20), but he wrongly lists his use of Hebrew as one of those signs. Haenchen, The Acts of the Apostles, 624, who thinks that the Lukan Paul addresses the crowd in Aramaic, lists his doing so as a sign of his adherence to Judaism. B. Rapske, The Book of Acts and Paul in Roman Custody (Grand Rapids, MI 1994) 142, writes that “whereas Paul presents himself in Greek to the Tribune as a Jew who is a citizen of Tarsus, to the Jews Paul presents himself in Aramaic as a zealous Jew who, though born in Tarsus, was raised in Jerusalem”. F.J. Foakes-Jackson, The Acts of the Apostles (New York 1931) 199 seems to detect a problem in the crowd’s sudden show of respect for Paul, but tries to put it down to an evident “dignity about the Apostle”. It is of course true that the hearing of Hebrew would have enhanced the crowd’s estimation of Paul’s Jewishness. Josephus’ address to the besieged Jews in Jerusalem (Bell. 6.96-97) offers a partial parallel, although there is more going on both in Acts and in Josephus’ account than a simple equation of Hebrew with Jewishness. Grintz, “Hebrew as the Spoken and Written Language in the Last Days of the Second Temple”, 44, writes, “Thus it can be taken for granted that when Josephus talks (Bellum Judaicum VI.2.1 § 96) about a speech he delivered by the command of the emperor in Hebrew:– ‘Ιώσηπος ὡς ἄν εἴη μὴ τῷ ‘Ιωάννῃ μόνον ἀλλὰ καὶ τοῖς πολλοῖς ἐν ἐπηκόῳ στὰς [sic] τά τε τοῦ Καίσαρος διήγγελλεν ἑβραίζων . . . ‘standing so that his words might reach the ears not only of John but also of the multitude, (he) delivered Caesar’s message in Hebrew’–he means precisely what he says: Hebrew and not Syrian. Hebrew then was not the language of the literary circles or of the learned few; it was also the language of the ‘multitude’ of Jerusalem, the vernacular”. Grintz is probably correct to translate ἑβραίζων as “in Hebrew”, but he moves too directly to the inference that Hebrew was the main