trickery aimed at a person: the cunning, treachery, or crooked speech by which someone is caught off guard and taken advantage of
The oldest use of this word was concrete. In the earliest Greek poetry it names the bait on a hook, and then any snare or rigged contrivance for catching something. By the time of the New Testament that concrete sense has dropped away, but the picture behind it has not: a person is taken the way an animal is taken, by something set for them that they never see coming. That is why the word is not simply a synonym for lying. A lie is false words (ψεῦδος); this is the crooked move made against somebody.
The New Testament uses it in three settings that shade into one another:
- as the method of a plot, the quiet and underhanded way conspirators arrange to seize a man
- as a settled streak in a person, named in lists of what comes out of a corrupt heart
- as something found in the mouth, the crooked word on the lips that Scripture condemns
Because the word describes a move made against another person, it belongs with the vocabulary of manipulation rather than of plain falsehood: the unscrupulous cleverness that will stop at nothing (πανουργία), the mask of playacting (ὑπόκρισις), the lure that makes a bad thing look attractive (ἀπάτη). Paul defends his preaching against exactly this charge, insisting there was no trick in his appeal, and later answers head on the accusation that he took the Corinthians in by a ruse.
In the letters of Peter the word carries the Old Testament with it. Two of the sharpest lines about it are quotations: the servant in whose mouth no deceit was found, and the promise to whoever keeps his lips from speaking it. Behind both stands the standard Hebrew word for treacherous dealing (מִרְמָה).