The Good and Evil Serpent (106 page)

A List of Words for “Snake” in the Hebrew Bible

In the following chart, I list the major biblical passages, and whether the noun symbolically represents something Positive (P), Negative (N), or Both (B). For convenience, the Hebrew words are presented in alphabetical order.

Term	Translation	Major Biblical Passages	Symbol
1.	“sand viper” 23	Isa 30:6, 59:5	N

This Hebrew noun can denote any poisonous snake,
²⁴
yet A. Bahat and M. Mishor suggest
is the
echis colorata.
²⁵
The noun
is a figure of speech in Job 20:16, “He sucks the poison of cobras; The tongue of the sand viper kills him.” The Hebrew
‘eph’eh
may be onomatopoetic; that is, it may originate from an attempt to mimic the hissing of a snake.
²⁶
The same may be said about all Hebrew names for a serpent in which
p
or
ph
appear. In Isaiah 30:6 the “sand viper,” along with other creatures, especially the lion, are “the beasts of the South” who come from “the land of trouble and anguish,” namely, Egypt. In the Hebrew Bible, the verb nV3 appears only once, in Isaiah 42:14; it represents the groaning when one is in pain, as a woman in labor. The verb seems cognate to
and the noun would then have arisen from thoughts on the pain when the “sand viper” bit a human.

The translators of the Septuagint rendered the Hebrew noun variously (octnq in Job 20:16, aomSeq in Isaiah 30:6, paoiliOKoq [exi8va in Aquila] in Isa 59:5). The Hebrew
can be equivalent to exi8va,
²⁷
“viper,” in Acts 28:3. This Greek noun in Matthew and Luke signifies “unbelievers,” “hypocrites,” and “evil people” (Mt 3:7, 12:34, 23:33; Lk 3:7).
²⁸
The noun nVQH appears among the Qumran Scrolls, notably in the
Thanksgiving Hymns.
²⁹

2.

“dragon-snake”

Deut 33:22

?

The meaning of the Hebrew noun
was once clear to scholars. It denoted only a proper name of a place, Bashan,
³⁰
which was identified as the Kingdom of Og, the territory east of the Jordan, extending from the Jabbok River to Mount Her-mon.
³¹

Does this noun also have another meaning? The translator of the Septuagint in Psalm 68(67):23(22) seems to have been somewhat confused; he capitalized “from” and merely transliterated Bashan”
(‘EK
Baoav).
³²
The translator of the passage in the Peshitta has rendered
(and there is no reason to postulate a variant)
³³
with the interesting
“which [is] from the house of teeth,” or better idiomatically “from the edge of a steep rock.”
³⁴
The Peshitta text probably resulted from a Syriac scribe’s guess concerning the meaning of the Greek. That translation presents a meaningful rendering of Psalm 68 [67 in the LXX, but 68 in the Peshitta]. A lucid translation, however, should not be misleading in regard to the sense of the original Hebrew.

We receive no help in understanding this Hebrew noun
from the hundreds of manuscripts found in the Qumran caves.
³⁵
The word does not appear; a similar form is found, however, but the form is the noun “tooth” with a preformative
beth
. In the
Copper Scroll
we find “in a rock peak (or cliff)”
, which is literally “in the tooth of a rock”). The form in the
Temple Scroll,]
, is again simply “tooth” plus the preposition (11QT 61.12 [an echo of the
lex talionis
following Deut 19:21]). Both passages in these scrolls parallel what we observed regarding the Peshitta of Psalm 68. Thus, while we have more data for ascertaining the meaning of the noun and root in antiquity, there is still no convincing evidence in extant Hebrew manuscripts that
denoted a snake.