Tool Beta
The Ancient World Behind the Text
Pick a passage anywhere in the New Testament. See the customs and ideas a first reader knew without being told.
Acts 16:16-24, The slave girl with a Python spirit
A slave girl who earns her owners money by fortune-telling follows Paul, crying out about the Most High God. Paul drives the spirit out, and her owners drag him and Silas before the magistrates, who have them beaten and jailed.
Acts 16:16-24, in every translation this tool compares.
In Philippi a slave girl possessed by a fortune-telling spirit earns money for her owners, and for days she follows Paul's party shouting that they serve the highest God and announce salvation. Exasperated, Paul orders the spirit out by Jesus' authority, and it leaves. Her owners, their income gone, haul Paul and Silas before the city authorities, accusing them as Jews who promote customs unlawful for Romans. The crowd joins in, and the magistrates have the two beaten and locked in the inner cell with their feet fastened.
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The Python spirit tied the girl to Apollo's oracle at Delphi, whose priestess was believed to have a god in her belly and was nicknamed a belly-talker for the deep second voice some writers credited to a daimon (Arnold); Wright notes that some diviners were frauds and some seemed truly possessed. Exorcists often used the names of higher spirits to drive out lower ones; Paul instead speaks with Jesus' delegated authority (Keener and his notes). On the girl's cry, the cultural backgrounds notes say Most High was a title Gentiles also gave Zeus, and Wright adds that salvation to a Philippian meant health, prosperity or rescue; Keener notes that magical texts treated the supreme God, identified with the Jewish God, as the most powerful. The owners turn a loss of income into a charge of teaching un-Roman customs: Romans complained that Jews made converts, and anti-Judaism was fashionable (Keener and his notes), though practicing a different religion was not itself illegal (the CSB Study Bible). The magistrates were the duoviri, the colony's two chief officials, whose lictors carried rods, and unless the accused were citizens they were normally beaten before trial (Keener and his notes).
- Clinton E. Arnold, Powers of Darkness, ch. 1, Magic and Divination, section The Spirit of Divination: Acts 16
- N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone, Part Two, comment on Acts 16:11-24
- NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible, notes on Acts 16:17, 16:18, 16:20, 16:22 and 16:24
- Craig S. Keener, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament, on Acts 16:16, 16:17, 16:18, 16:19, 16:20, 16:21 and 16:22
- CSB Study Bible, notes on Acts 16:17-18 and 16:20-21
