18 After this, Paul stayed many days longer and then took leave of the brothers and set sail for Syria, and with him Priscilla and Aquila. At Cenchreae he had cut his hair, for he was under a vow. 19 And they came to Ephesus, and he left them there, but he himself went into the synagogue and reasoned with the Jews. 20 When they asked him to stay for a longer period, he declined. 21 But on taking leave of them he said, “I will return to you if God wills,” and he set sail from Ephesus.
22 When he had landed at Caesarea, he went up and greeted the church, and then went down to Antioch.
I still remember the first time I noticed these verses. We were watching a movie of the book of Acts and all of a sudden Paul was bald! You kind of notice it when somebody is bald. Even if it’s a guy that’s slowly losing his hair, when he finally commits and shaves off the remnant, you notice it.
Even more shocking than Paul’s suddenly bald head is the reasoning behind it. We don’t actually know the whole story. It looks like it’s a Nazarite vow as detailed in Numbers 6. The fact that Paul is still doing vows by the guidelines of Numbers 6 is also wild. He’s been preaching that we’re free from the law of Moses for over a decade at this point.
For a Nazarite vow, a man or a woman would shave their head and make a commitment to God for a designated amount of time. For that time period, they wouldn’t drink any wine or do anything that would make them unclean. If a family member died, they couldn’t even go near the body because that would make them unclean.
At the end of the time of the vow, they would shave their head again and that cut-off hair would be part of the offering.
We don’t know if this haircut is part of the beginning of the vow or the end.
One part that is kind of cool about this is that as Paul went around preaching, his shaved head slowly re-growing would show that he was under a vow. That would be a strong statement to his Jewish accusers. This fits with Paul saying “I became all things to all men so that I might save some.”
Finally, Ephesus is one of the first places where Paul is asked to stay longer but doesn’t. He isn’t run out of town or beaten, but he leaves while they are still asking for more. God will bring so much out of Paul’s relationship with the Ephesians that you might wonder if this vow and sacrifice was answered by God in the church of Ephesus. It doesn’t say anything about that, but that would be a great question to ask someday.
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