The meaning of the word rendered sandbank (“shoal” or “reef” in many translations) is disputed. It literally means “a place between two seas,” and for this reason the New English Bible has rendered it as “between cross currents” (see Jerusalem Bible “But the cross currents carried them into a shoal”). It is not, of course, strange to encounter this type of difficulty of translation in the rendering of sandbank, since such a bank normally does develop when there are two currents running either parallel or even against each other.

The term sandbank may be translated in some languages as “a mound of sand underneath the water” or “a hill of sand underneath the water.”

The phrase went aground may be translated as “stuck in the ground,” “hit the ground and stopped” or “was stopped by the hill of sand.”

The second clause of verse 41 explains more precisely what is involved in “going aground”—for example, “the front part of the ship hit the sandbank, and no one could move it” or “the front part of the ship struck a hill of sand and stopped firm.”

The last clause of this verse is rendered in some languages by “the strong waves broke to pieces the back part of the ship.” This is a perfectly possible rendering in most languages, since one often cannot say that something is broken … by the violence of the waves. The term violence must in some way be related to the waves since they are the objects which do the breaking.

Quoted with permission from Newman, Barclay M. and Nida, Eugene A. A Handbook on The Acts of the Apostles. (UBS Handbook Series). New York: UBS, 1972. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .