See introduction to the previous section.

16:16–17 The missionaries appear to have gone week by week to the place of prayer for a number of weeks, and as they did so, they were followed on several occasions by a demented slave girl whose shouting made them the center of public attention. The force of the Greek of verse 17 is that she “kept on following” and “kept on shouting” about them. Luke describes her in a curious way (not apparent in NIV): She had “a spirit,” he says, “a python” (v. 16). The word “python” originally meant a snake, but by way of various associations, it had come to be used sometimes of ventriloquists, and ventriloquism was a trick often employed by fortune tellers and other charlatans. Something of this may be implied in Luke’s phrase “the python spirit.” But more t…