to fall into something that closes around you: to land inside a pit, inside another's grip, or inside a ruined condition you cannot simply step back out of
Greek made this verb out of the ordinary word for falling (πίπτω) plus a prefix meaning "in" or "into." The prefix carries the whole point. This is not falling over or falling down; it is ending up inside something, with the walls of the thing now around you. Where the same root with the opposite prefix means coming out of a place that was holding you (ἐκπίπτω), this word means going in.
Seven New Testament uses all keep that shape, and they climb from the literal to the terrifying:
- a sheep drops into a pit on the Sabbath and has to be hauled out, and two blind men walking together end up in the same ditch
- a traveler on the Jericho road ends up in the hands of bandits who strip him and leave him
- a church leader who thinks too much of himself ends up inside a verdict, or inside disgrace, or inside a trap
- the writer of Hebrews names the most fearful landing of all, into the hands of the living God
What holds the range together is not the badness of the destination but its grip. In every case the person or animal arrives somewhere that now has hold of them, which is why a snare is the picture Paul reaches for twice.
It is worth noticing what the word does not say. It assigns no blame. The sheep is innocent, the traveler is a victim, and the man who wants to get rich has walked straight toward the trap himself, yet Greek uses the same verb for all three. Someone put into a place by another party gets a different verb altogether (ἐμβάλλω). Luke shows how fine the shading can be: in the story of the good neighbor he says at the start that the traveler ran into robbers (περιπίπτω), and then at the end, looking back on where the man wound up, that he fell into their hands.