Translation
And a voice again for second time to him, “What GOD has cleansed
Go to footnote numberyou not make common.” (See comment below.)
Go to footnote numberParaphrase
Then the voice came to him a second time, saying, “What THE CREATOR AND OWNER OF ALL THINGS has made clean and proclaimed as clean, you should not make or call common.”
Footnotes
1
The verb form used here is an active verb, meaning that God had actually cleansed something which had formerly been considered unclean; He did not simply call it clean, He actually cleansed it then He told Peter He was calling it clean. Both actions were probably involved, but it started with actual cleansing.
2
According to the Topical Lexicon of the Biblehub.com website, this verb always conveys a passive or causative sense, even when it is an active verb. Therefore, this verb always carries the idea of “to make common or to consider common,” in contrast to a normal active meaning of “to be common.”
GOD THREW PETER SEVERAL CURVEBALLS
The first curveball was that God switched the phraseology that was usually used in the Old Testament when He said, “What God has cleansed you [should] not make common.”
Consider that Peter and God were having this conversation in Hebrew or Aramaic. Both Hebrew and Greek had different words for “common” and “unclean”. So this is not a matter of confusion of words. This was purposeful on God’s part. And the writer of Acts, and those that copied this would have paused and looked at it at least twice before writing it. They would only have written it that way on purpose, not be accident, it was too strange.
Another curve ball is that God had not only cleansed that which was unclean, the implication is that He also made it holy. I say this because something that was clean and common was not a problem – that was what they ate all the time. In fact, they could not regularly eat that which was holy and clean – set aside for God’s special purposes. God was telling Peter, “That which I have elevated to the highest level, don’t you dare take it upon yourself to bring it down to a lower level.”