The Narrative Role of Semitic Languages in the Book of Acts 115 companions were ignorant of Hebrew. Yet there is something to be said against both points. As for (1), the reconciliation of Acts 9,7 with 22,9 was not the point of the investigation. Rather, that reconciliation serves as an independent support for my interpretation of 26,14. This, I think, increases the likelihood of the reconciliation by multiplying its narratival usefulness. As for (2), it should be pointed out that we do not know whether the men traveling with Paul were his regular associates or a dispatch from the Temple guard. The former scenario strikes me as more likely, however, and in it we are met with the greater probability that these men could not understand Hebrew. As a final consideration, let us also remember that it is in 26,14, and there alone, that we are told that the Lord spoke to Paul “in the Hebrew dialect”. This detail merits mention in 26,14, which suggests that it has some significance for understanding what is going on, but it does not merit mention in chaps. 9 and 22, which perhaps suggests that its point was made in some other way in those chapters.18 Conclusion Philology is on the side of translating τῇ Ἑβραΐδι διαλέκτῳ as “He- brew”, but scholarship has not been of one mind on whether philology alone should decide the issue. The point of this article is that philology need not bear the whole burden of exegesis: the narrative logic of Acts 21 – 22 leads to the same conclusion. The tribune forges a connection between Paul’s ability to speak Greek and his possible identity as “the Egyptian”, which implies that Greek was fairly scarce among the Jewish crowd, yet while the tribune is depicted as conversing directly with the crowd in an effort to learn Paul’s offense (implying that the tribune could understand The heavenly voice’s reference to Paul “kicking against the goads” is a graecism (see 18 Euripides, Bacchae 794-95; F. Smend, “Untersuchungen zu den Acta-Darstellungen von der Bekehrung des Paulus”, ΑΓΓΕΛΟΣ 1 [1925] 34-45, esp. 36-37), which is difficult to accept as an element originally conveyed in Hebrew. As C. F. Evans, “The Kerygma”, JTS 7 (1956) 25-41, esp. 34, observes, “the risen Christ, although speaking in the Hebrew tongue, uses a Greek tag ‘to kick against the goads’. Of course, it is possible that Paul’s trial was in Greek, and that Paul has supplied this graecism, but it is more likely that Luke has supplied it. See H. Windisch, “Die Christusepiphanie vor Damascus und ihre religionsgeschichtlichen Parallelen”, ZNW 31 (1932) 1-23; A. Vögeli, “Lukas und Euripides”, TZ 9 (1953) 415-38. This still leaves us with the question of how the note about Christ speaking in Hebrew functions rhetorically, for either Paul or Luke. For understanding this rhetorical function, it is significant that Hebrew was not universally regarded as the language of oracles: see Dalman, Jesus–Jeshua, 17.