Tool Beta
The Gods of the Bible
Every named divine being in Scripture, what the text calls it, and what the ancient world thought it was.
The python spirit
A fortune-telling spirit named after the oracle at Delphi, cast out of a slave girl.
Acts 16:16-18, in every translation this tool compares.
A slave girl tells fortunes, and the Greek calls the thing inside her a python, the word for the oracle at Delphi. Luke never says she was a fraud. He has Paul cast out the thing that was making her right.
The Greek says a spirit, a python, the term for the Delphic oracle. Luke doesn't call the girl a fraud; he has Paul cast out the thing that made her accurate. DDD traces how the word got there. Python was the dragon Apollo killed to take over the sanctuary at Delphi, and the name drifted through the oracular priestess who spoke there, the Pythia, into a general label for any prophesying spirit or medium by the first century AD. The Vulgate uses the same word to translate the "medium or necromancer" of Leviticus 20:27 (pythonicus spiritus), which shows the term had become fully generic and gives the term a second biblical anchor beyond Acts.
G4436 (πύθων), 1 occ
- Acts 16:16-18
- Leviticus 20:27 (Vulgate)
- DDD s.v. "Python," 669-671
