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The Ancient World Behind the Text: Ideas
The customs, offices and ideas a first reader knew without being told, what each meant then, and the nearest thing you already know.
Oracles and fortune-telling
Greeks and Romans sought the future from oracles, omens and seers, above all from Apollo's priestess at Delphi. A girl with a Python spirit was linked to that famous oracle.
People paid good money to the woman at the fair who could tell them what next year held. Greeks and Romans wanted to know the future before they acted. They asked oracles at famous shrines, watched the flight of birds, cut open animals to read their insides, and took dreams and omens seriously before a journey or a battle. The most famous oracle of all was Apollo's priestess at Delphi, called the Pythoness. The Old Testament forbade all of it.
Python was a title of Apollo, who had killed the dragon Python. His most famous temple, at Delphi, had a priestess called the Pythoness, who gave obscure messages in a trance for the priests to interpret. Her oracles were the most famous in antiquity. So the girl in Acts 16:16 has literally "the spirit of a Python," and the cultural backgrounds notes conclude, "This spirit is thus associated with the highest-level pagan prophetic powers." Keener calls it a powerful demon, and the ESV Study Bible a demonic spirit. Interest in oracles is how such a girl earned money for her owners. The Old Testament forbids fortune-telling (Deuteronomy 18:10; 1 Samuel 28:8), and the Greek Old Testament uses the same verb for it as Acts 16:16. Wright and Bird list "omens and oracles, even inspecting entrails" among the ordinary practices of ancient religion. Pagans setting out by sea sacrificed to the gods, and bad omens, astrology or dreams could keep a ship in port. Romans checked entrails and the flight of birds before war, and they respected divination more than inspired prophecy. Greeks treated a predictive oracle as a warning that might be avoided, and prophecies were sometimes conditional warnings. Divination is far older than Delphi. Podany describes the Assyrian king Esarhaddon (681 to 669 BC) consulting astronomers who read omens in the sky and diviners who read the gods' answers in the livers of sacrificed rams. When an enslaved girl in Harran spoke as the mouthpiece of the god Nusku, an official proposed testing her prophecy by such a reading. The likeness to the slave girl of Acts 16 is drawn here, not by Podany.
An analogy: a celebrity psychic with a hotline and a long waiting list. People who would never call her still know her name, and a girl said to have her gift is worth money to whoever manages her.
A spirit linked to Apollo's oracle, as in Acts 16:16-18, sets the most famous prophetic power of the Greek world against the name of Jesus. On a voyage, where pagans looked for omens before sailing, Paul's warning in Acts 27:10 would sound to them like a seer's.
Not a private business. A psychic sells her own gift. The Pythoness spoke for Apollo at his temple and priests interpreted her, and both the law of Moses and Acts treat the spirit behind such speech as real and hostile.
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- NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible, notes on Acts 16:16 and 21:12
- Craig S. Keener, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament, on Acts 16:16, 21:12-14 and 27:10
- ESV Study Bible, study note on Acts 16:16
- CSB Study Bible, note on Acts 16:16
- N. T. Wright and Michael F. Bird, The New Testament in Its World, ch. 7, The Greco-Roman Context of the Early Church
- Amanda H. Podany, Weavers, Scribes, and Kings: A New History of the Ancient Near East, ch. 18, Bel-ushezib and Sasi: An Astronomer and a Suspected Conspirator, and An Enslaved Female Prophet
