thorubos

The lexica agree on the sense and differ only in how they carve it. LSJ gives θόρυβος as noise, uproar, clamor (of a crowd or an assembly, and of the shouting down of a speaker), then confusion, tumult. BDAG divides the New Testament data in two: the noise or clamor of an excited crowd (Mk 5:38) and turmoil, excitement, uproar amounting to a riot (Mt 26:5; 27:24; Mk 14:2; Ac 20:1; 21:34; 24:18). Louw and Nida place the noun at 39.43-44, under hostility and strife, defining it as a public disturbance involving violence, while the cognate verb also appears at 25.244 under emotional distress; Bauernfeind's TDNT article treats noun and verb together and notes that the noun in Acts uniformly denotes urban riot. Etymologically the word is an expressive formation in -βος alongside other noise nouns such as ὄτοβος and φλοῖσβος (Chantraine, Frisk); Beekes treats the instability of the family (θορυβ-, τονθρυ-, θρυ(λ)-, τύρβη) as evidence of a Pre-Greek substrate word rather than an inherited root. Spicq and Moulton and Milligan document a civic and administrative register: a Ptolemaic decree (OGI 48.9) forbids officials θόρυβον παρέχειν in councils and assemblies, and petition papyri from Tebtunis and Oxyrhynchus use the word-group of neighbors or officials harassing a plaintiff. Josephus makes θόρυβος his standard term for the succession of Judean disturbances (B.J. 2.9.4 §175; A.J. 18.3.1-4 §§55-89), which is close to the register Luke adopts in Acts. In the Septuagint the noun most often renders הָמוֹן (1 Sam 14:19; 2 Sam 18:29; Isa 13:4; Ez 7:11) and שָׁאוֹן (Isa 24:8; 66:6; Am 2:2), both crowd-and-war words. Two per-verse debates are live. At Mark 5:38, where the noun labels the mourners' noise and is picked up by the verb in v. 39, commentators divide over whether the word-group denotes the scripted lament of hired mourners (Davies and Allison, Luz, Keener, Marcus, Guelich, Edwards) or a broader loud commotion that the flute-players and wailers in the context color as funeral noise (France, Nolland, Collins, Hooker); the practical difference for translation is small. At Acts 24:18, Keener argues that Paul's denial (οὐ μετὰ ὄχλου οὐδὲ μετὰ θορύβου) rebuts precisely the two elements a Roman prosecutor needed for a public-order charge, unlawful assembly and resulting disturbance, with reference to Digest 48.19.28.3 and the lex Julia de vi publica; Bruce, Fitzmyer, Witherington and Bock follow this reading, and Haenchen minimizes it. Neither debate touches what the noun denotes, and no lexicon proposes an inward sense for it in the New Testament.