to place a person or thing in an ordered position assigned by an authority: to appoint, station, arrange, or set in order.
At its heart this is a word about order. To use it of someone or something is to put it in its proper place within an arrangement that an authority has set: a soldier in the ranks, an officer over a post, a tax at a fixed amount, a meeting at a fixed time. In the centuries around the New Testament it was an everyday word of government and business, used far more for appointing officials and scheduling payments than for anything on a battlefield.
The New Testament keeps that whole range, and the exact force depends on who does the placing and how:
- Stationed under command, a person is ranked within an ordered chain of authority.
- Assigned by God or a ruler, a person is appointed to a task, an office, or a destiny.
- Settling a plan, a group arranges a decision, sets a day, or names a place.
- Acting on their own resolve, people devote themselves to a service.
Because the word itself only says that something has been placed in an ordered position, it does not decide, on its own, how much weight that placing carries. That is why two of its uses sit at the center of long-running debates: whether Rome's rulers are "instituted by God" (Romans 13:1) and whether the Gentiles who came to faith were "appointed to eternal life" (Acts 13:48). In both, the word supplies the idea of ordered placement, and the surrounding text and theology supply the rest.
Nuances
Whether "appointed to eternal life" in Acts 13:48 asserts a prior divine election, a voluntary human disposition, or an ordered placement the verb itself leaves undefined.
- contestedThe form is passive with God as the unnamed agent, and the completed state stands before their believing, so the clause teaches election to eternal life prior to faith.; John Calvin, Commentary upon the Acts of the Apostles (1552); F. F. Bruce, The Book of the Acts, NICNT, rev. ed. (1988); Darrell L. Bock, Acts, BECNT (2007)
- contestedNo agent is named, the same verb is used of a household devoting itself in 1 Corinthians 16:15, and the previous verse ascribes rejection to human choice, so the clause need not assert eternal election and may describe the Gentiles' own disposition.; Henry Alford, The Greek Testament, rev. ed. (1871); John Wesley, Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament (1755); Brian J. Abasciano, "On the Translation of Acts 13:48" (2015)
- contestedThe form is passive with God as the implied agent, but Luke names no agent, uses a form that is grammatically ambiguous, and offers no doctrine, so the clause assigns the Gentiles a place in God's saving order without by itself settling the later election debate.; C. K. Barrett, The Acts of the Apostles, ICC (1994-1998); Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Acts of the Apostles, Anchor Bible (1998); A. T. Robertson, Word Pictures in the New Testament (1930)