Λαός, a word of rarest use in Attic prose, but occurring between one and two thousand times in the Septuagint, is almost always there a title reserved for the elect people, the Israel of God. Still there are exceptions. The Philistines are a λαός (
Δῆμος occurs only in St. Luke, and in him, as might be expected, only in the Acts, that is, after his narrative has left behind it the limitations of the Jewish Church, and has entered on and begun to move in the ampler spaces, and among the more varied conditions of the heathen world. The following are the four occasions of its use, 12:22; 17:5; 19:30, 33; they all exemplify well that fine and accurate use of technical terms, that choice of the fittest among them, which we so often observe in St. Luke, and which is so characteristic a mark of the highly educated man. The Greek δῆμος is the Latin ‘populus,’ which Cicero (De Re Publ. i. 25; cf. Augustine, De Civ. Dei, ii. 21) thus defines: ‘Populus autem non omnis hominum coetus quoquo modo eongregatus, sed coetus multitudinis juris consensu et utilitatis communione sociatus;’ ‘die Gemeinde,’ the free commonalty (Plutarch, Mul. Virt. 15, in fine), and these very often contemplated as assembled and in actual exercise of their rights as citizens. This idea indeed so dominates the word that ἐν τῷ δήμῳ is equivalent to, ‘in a popular assembly.’ It is invariably thus used by St. Luke. If we want the exact opposite to δῆμος, it is ὄχλος, the disorganized, or rather the unorganized, multitude (
[The following Strong's numbers apply to this section:G1218,G1484,G2992,G3793.]
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