Greek word · G4436
Πύθων
pythōn
divining spirit
(1) Python, the serpent or dragon that guarded Delphi until Apollo killed it, which is why Apollo was called 'Pythian' and his priestess the Pythia.
Appears once in the Greek New Testament. ·
What it means
πύθων, -ωνος, ὁ
1. in cl., Python, a serpent slain by Apollo, who is hence surnamed the Pythian.
2. In Plut. (ii, 414 E), a name given to ventriloquist soothsayers (ἐγγαστρίμυθοι; cf. Leviticus 19:31 20:6, 27, 1 Samuel 28:7), and perhaps in this sense πνεῦμα πύθωνα, a python-spirit: Acts 16:16.†
(AS)
From G. Abbott-Smith, A Manual Greek Lexicon of the New Testament (1922), via STEPBible.org (CC BY 4.0).
In depth
- Range of meaning
(1) Python, the serpent or dragon that guarded Delphi until Apollo killed it, which is why Apollo was called 'Pythian' and his priestess the Pythia. (2) By the first century, a general term for a person, or the spirit inside a person, who gave oracles, especially those thought to speak from their belly in a voice not their own.
- Against the English
Most English versions say 'a spirit of divination' (KJV, BSB, WEB, ESV, NASB) or describe what it did (NIV: 'a spirit by which she predicted the future'). This is accurate, but it drops the name 'Python' and with it the link to Delphi and Apollo. YLT ('a spirit of Python') keeps it.
- How it drifted
Modern English hears 'python' as the name of a large snake that squeezes its prey. That zoological use came much later: naturalists named the snake genus Python after the myth in the early 1800s. Luke's readers heard Delphi, not a constrictor.
- Used elsewhere in the period
Plutarch, writing around 100 CE (On the Obsolescence of Oracles 9, 414E), says that the belly-speakers once called 'Eurycleis' were called 'Pythones' in his day. Plutarch was himself a priest at Delphi. The Latin Vulgate uses pytho/python for the Hebrew 'ob, a medium who calls up the dead: 'a woman having a python' in 1 Sam 28:7, and 'one who consults pythons' in Deut 18:11. There the Greek Old Testament has engastrimythos, 'belly-talker'.
Where it appears
Acts · 1
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Acts 16:16 πύθωνα Python
One day as we were going to the place of prayer, we were met by a slave girl with a spirit of divination, who earned a large income for her masters by fortune-telling.
Here: Literally 'a python'. The name comes from the serpent at Delphi that Apollo killed, and by Luke's day it had become a common word for a person or spirit who gave oracles, a 'Pythian'. Luke's readers would have connected it with Apollo's famous oracle.
Word data: STEPBible.org (CC BY 4.0), main text only.