viper: a small, live-bearing, deadly-venomous snake, used both for the creature itself and as an insult for venomous, malignant people
This is the ordinary Greek word for a viper, a small, live-bearing, deadly-venomous snake. Four of its five appearances are the same fixed insult, "brood of vipers," thrown first by John the Baptist and then by Jesus at religious leaders and crowds alike. The fifth is a real snake that fastens on Paul's hand on a beach at Malta (Acts 28:3). The two uses are one word doing two jobs: naming the creature, and turning the creature into a picture of deadly, malignant people.
The insult carried more menace than a modern reader hears. Greek and Roman writers widely believed that young vipers killed their mother as they were born, chewing their way out of her. So "brood of vipers" did not merely mean "nasty people"; it hinted at people bred from killers, a charge that bites hardest where Jesus has just accused the leaders of descending from those who murdered the prophets.
The gospel writers also made a pointed word choice. The Greek Old Testament almost never used this word, preferring the word for "asp" (ἀσπίς) when it translated the Hebrew snake terms. By reaching instead for the classical Greek word for viper, the very term poets used for treacherous, monstrous women, they gave the rebuke the ring of sharp, cutting insult rather than routine scriptural language.
On the beach at Malta the word returns to its plain sense: an actual snake bites Paul, the onlookers wait for him to swell up and drop dead, and when he does not they decide he must be a god. Whether the creature was a true viper (Malta has none today) or another venomous snake taken for one is debated, but the word itself simply names the deadly snake everyone feared.
Nuances
Whether echidna in Acts 28:3 denotes a true viper (family Viperidae) or, more loosely, any dangerous venomous snake, given that Malta has no vipers today and no fossil evidence of them.
- majorityA true viper, consistent with a faunal change over two millennia of dense human settlement on the island.; C. K. Barrett, The Acts of the Apostles (ICC), vol. 2, 1998, 1222-24; Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Acts of the Apostles (Anchor Bible), 1998, 780-83
- minorityA functionally generic term for a venomous snake, allowing a mildly venomous non-viper such as a rear-fanged colubrid actually present on Malta.; Louw-Nida, Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament Based on Semantic Domains, 4.53
Disputed
What background gives the insult "brood of vipers" its force in Matthew and Luke.
- majorityProphetic invective for venomous, malignant persons, with an Old Testament backdrop (Isaiah 30:6; 59:5) of vipers and adders' eggs; the folklore of matricidal young is at most a secondary echo.; W. D. Davies and Dale C. Allison, Matthew (ICC), vol. 1, 303-4; Ulrich Luz, Matthew 1-7 (Hermeneia), 2007, 168-71; Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke I-IX (Anchor Bible), 1981, 464-68
- minorityA deliberate appeal to the widespread ancient folklore that vipers kill their mother in birth, so the leaders are branded the offspring of those who murder their own kin, fitting the charge in Matthew 23:29-36 that they descend from prophet-killers.; Craig S. Keener, "'Brood of Vipers' (Matthew 3.7; 12.34; 23.33)," JSNT 28 (2005): 3-11
- minorityAn allusion to the "seed of the serpent" of Genesis 3, read by some patristic and social-scientific interpreters.; Bruce J. Malina and Richard L. Rohrbaugh, Social-Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels