The Good and Evil Serpent (117 page)

And pierced the dragon (
)?

Are you not the one who dried up the sea,

The waters of the great deep;

That made the depths of the sea a way

For the redeemed to cross over?

Observe how “cut Rahab apart” is placed in synonymous parallelism with “pierced the dragon;” thus, Rahab is conceptually similar to “the dragon.”
¹⁷⁷
The same identity seems evident in Job 26:12–13;
¹⁷⁸
there “Rahab” is equal to the “fleeing serpent
.” The origin of the noun, and concept, seems to be Canaanite mythology.
¹⁷⁹

In Psalm 89:11 we are told that the Lord God has “crushed Rahab like a carcass.” This verse certainly does not indicate that Rahab denotes the chaotic sea. It suggests that “Rahab” is a serpent-like creature that has been killed.
¹⁸⁰

13.

“burning-serpent”

Isa 14:29

P for Israel

Num 21:8

P for Israel

The Hebrew noun
seems etymologically linked with the verb with the same radicals that means “to burn;” hence, the snake imagined is one whose bite causes a burning sensation or a red (burning) color on the skin.
¹⁸¹
When one studies snakes and ophidian iconography, which stresses the eyes of serpents, one may also imagine that
saraph
denoted the red or fiery eye of the snake. According to Isaiah 14:29, the Philistines will be plagued by various serpents, including a “burning-serpent.” According to Numbers 21:8, Yahweh told Moses to make a Tit) and “set it on a pole” so that “everyone who is bitten (by the burning-serpents), when he looks at it, shall live.”

The Greek translator chose for this noun an idiomatic rendering “flying serpents” (
), and that is the
terminus technicus
found in Isaiah 14:29 and 30:6. Most likely, as so many nouns in this list (and in contrast to Greek nouns for “snake”),
¹⁸²
srph
sounds onomatopoeic.

The noun
appears in the Qumran Scrolls. In 4QpIsa
^a
Frag. 8–10.13 it appears in a quotation from Isaiah 14:28–30 (see former comments). In 4Q159 Frag. 1.2.17 it is the verbal form “burned.”

Under the basic root
are categorized two Hebrew expressions that denote various types of snakes. On the one hand, it is obvious that not all adjectives associated with a “serpent” designate another type of serpent; for example, in Isaiah 27:1 we hear about Leviathan as a “fleeing serpent” and a “twisted serpent.” But, on the other hand, some compound forms do seem to indicate a type of snake; at least two with
are significant. The first is
combined with
:

14.	“fiery serpent”	Deut 8:15	N
	“the fiery serpents”	Num 21:6	N