Bible Strands
Acts 27:28
They took soundings and found that the water was twenty fathoms deep. Going a little farther, they took another set of soundings that read fifteen fathoms.
Berean Standard Bible
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Study note
Setting — The narrator reports the sailors' actions during the fourteenth night of a storm in the Adriatic Sea, immediately after they sensed land was approaching.
The words — βολίσαντες (bolisantes) means "having taken soundings," describing the act of dropping weights to gauge depth. ὀργυιὰς (orguias) denotes "fathoms," the unit of measure recorded as twenty and then fifteen.
The thread — This verse belongs to the continuous account of the ship's drift across the Adriatic Sea, tracking the crew's practical response as the storm progresses. The recorded decrease in depth runs parallel to the surrounding verses that document the sailors' growing urgency and their preparation for imminent landfall.
Why it lands — The verse requires the reader to observe how sequential measurements document a physical reality, anchoring the narrative in observable events. It asks the reader to track the timeline of the voyage through concrete data rather than rhetorical description.
Drafted by a language model from the text, its original words and its cross-references, then checked against them. It can still be wrong: open the verse in the app to report it.
The Greek words
King James Version
And sounded, and found it twenty fathoms: and when they had gone a little further, they sounded again, and found it fifteen fathoms.