Papers · Where Do Dragons Come From?

Chapter 5

Are There Dragons in the Bible?

Yes and no, and the reason is that the question is really about translators.

5.1 The word

The Hebrew word is תנין, tannin. It is the closest thing the Hebrew Bible has to a dragon, and it appears in eleven passages.

At *Genesis 1:21* God creates the great tanninim on the fifth day. This is worth pausing on. Here they are not enemies. God makes them and approves of them.

At *Exodus 7:9 and 7:10* Aaron throws his staff down in front of Pharaoh and it turns into a tannin. The same word used for the great sea creatures of the fifth day is used for what a shepherd's stick becomes on a palace floor.

At *Isaiah 27:1* God will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent and Leviathan the twisting serpent with a hard and great and strong sword, and will kill the tannin that is in the sea.

At *Isaiah 51:9* God's arm is the one that cut Rahab to pieces and ran the tannin through.

At *Jeremiah 51:34* Nebuchadnezzar has swallowed Jerusalem like a tannin.

At *Psalm 74:13* God breaks the heads of the tanninim on the water, and in the next verse crushes the heads of Leviathan.

At *Psalm 91:13* the faithful walk on the lion and the tannin.

At *Psalm 148:7* the tanninim are told to praise God from the deeps, along with the weather.

At *Job 7:12* Job asks whether he is the sea or a tannin, that God should set a guard over him.

At *Lamentations 4:3* the word turns up in a comparison about nursing young, and is usually taken there to mean jackals.

5.2 What the translators did with it

The King James Version translates tannin as "dragon" in most places. At Genesis 1:21 it says "whale". At Job 7:12 it says "whale". At Exodus 7:9 it says "serpent". In the prophets it sometimes says "dragons" where modern Bibles say "jackals".

One Hebrew word. Four English ones. The choice made passage by passage according to what sounded right.

Modern translations redistribute the same word differently, which is not a criticism of either. Tannin covers ground that no single English word covers, so every translator has to choose, and English readers have been reading somebody else's choices for four hundred years.

So counting the word "dragon" in an English Bible does not count dragons. It counts translators.

5.3 What Israel kept

Line the eleven passages up against the complete Greek dragon of Chapters 3 and 4 and the overlap is clear and partial.

Israel kept the enormous serpent. It kept the creature as an enemy of God at the beginning of the world, which matches the Greek pattern of a monster that threatens the order of things. And at Job 7:12 it kept the idea of a watch being kept over the creature, which is the Greek watching idea turned around: in Greece the dragon is the one who stares, and here it is the one who is stared at.

Israel did not keep the wings. It did not keep the fire. It did not keep the gold.

That is a fragment, and it is the fragment you would expect a culture to keep if what reached it was a story rather than a picture.

5.4 The Dragon's Eye

One detail deserves its own section.

At *Nehemiah 2:13* Nehemiah goes out at night through the Valley Gate to look at the broken walls of Jerusalem, and passes a place called עֵין הַתַּנִּין, ein ha-tannin.

The King James calls it "the dragon well". The Jewish Publication Society calls it "the Jackals' Spring". Both are fair, because tannin is exactly the slippery word we have been discussing.

The interesting part is the other half. עַיִן, ayin, means an eye. It also means a spring of water. Hebrew uses the same word for both, and so does Arabic. A spring is where water looks out of the ground.

So without bending the Hebrew at all, there is a place in Jerusalem called the Dragon's Eye.