made by human hands: produced by human work rather than given by God, and usually said with disapproval
The word is a compound of the Greek words for "hand" and "made," and by itself it says only that people made the thing. Its history gave it an edge. In the Greek translation of the Old Testament this was a standard label for an idol: where the Hebrew called the gods of the nations worthless things (אֱלִיל), the Greek often said simply that they were made by hand. Anyone who had heard those Scriptures read aloud would know the word as an insult aimed at manufactured gods.
The New Testament never attaches it to an idol. It attaches it to things that were genuinely holy, and that is the sting:
- the Jerusalem temple, in the charge witnesses brought against Jesus at his trial (Mark 14:58)
- that same temple in Stephen's speech, where the Most High is said not to live in such places (Acts 7:48)
- the shrines of Athens, in Paul's address to a city crowded with them (Acts 17:24)
- the sanctuary of the old covenant, which Hebrews says Christ walked past on his way into heaven itself (Hebrews 9:24), while the greater tent he did pass through is called the opposite (Hebrews 9:11)
- the mark of circumcision, cut into the body by a human hand (Ephesians 2:11)
The word almost always sits inside a denial. Something gets labeled made by hands so that a larger claim can be pressed against it: God does not live there, Christ did not enter there, the thing he will build is not like it. Its opposite, "not made by hands" (ἀχειροποίητος), appears in Greek only from the New Testament onward and seems to have been formed for exactly this contrast; Mark 14:58 sets the two words in a single sentence.
Nuances
Disputed
How much of the word's Old Testament idol-polemic carries over when the New Testament applies it to the Jerusalem temple and to the sanctuary of the old covenant.
- minorityThe adjective retains its Septuagint force, so calling the temple made by hands assimilates it to a manufactured idol and constitutes a radical critique of the temple cult, characteristic of a Hellenist strand within the earliest church.; Marcel Simon, St. Stephen and the Hellenists in the Primitive Church (Longmans, Green, 1958)
- majorityThe adjective marks the sanctuary as a human structure incapable of containing God, so the polemic targets a mistaken confidence in the building rather than the temple as such; Stephen's speech affirms a legitimate divinely sanctioned past for the sanctuary.; Dennis D. Sylva, "The Meaning and Function of Acts 7:46-50," Journal of Biblical Literature 106 (1987); Craig C. Hill, Hellenists and Hebrews: Reappraising Division within the Earliest Church (Fortress Press, 1992)