And when the people saw what Paul had done
In curing the lame man in so marvellous a manner, and concluding it to be a divine work, and what a mere creature could never perform:
they lift up their voices;
not in indignation and wrath, but as persons astonished:
saying in the speech of Lycaonia;
by which it should seem that Lystra was a city of Lycaonia, since the Lycaonian language was spoken in it; the Arabic version reads, "in their own tongue"; and the Syriac version, "in the dialect of the country"; very likely a dialect of the Greek tongue;
the gods are come down to us in the likeness of men;
they had a notion of deity, though a very wrong one; they thought there were more gods than one, and they imagined heaven to be the habitation of the gods; and that they sometimes descended on earth in human shape, as they supposed they now did.