Expositor's Bible Commentary Commentary Acts 4:37

"having a field, sold it, and brought the money and laid it at the apostles` feet." — Acts 4:37 (ASV)

Barnabas is an important figure in Luke’s account of the church’s expansion from Jerusalem to Rome; he appears a number of times as a kind of hinge between the mission to the Jewish world and that to the Gentiles (cf. 9:27; 11:22–30; 13:1–14:28; 15:2–4, 12, 22, 36–41; see also 1 Corinthians 9:6). Here, however, he is introduced as one who sold a field and gave the money to the apostles for distribution among those in need. We are not told whether the property he sold was in Cyprus or Palestine. Nor are we told how the biblical prohibition against Levites owning real estate applied in Barnabas’s case (cf. Numbers 18:20); such a regulation seems not always to have been observed (cf. Jeremiah 32:7–44). What we are told, however, is that Barnabas gave a practical demonstration of Christian social concern, undoubtedly under no compulsion of either precedent or rule (cf. 5:4).