Are There Dragons in the Bible?
Yes, in older translations. The King James Version uses the word dragon around thirty times. Modern translations usually do not, because the Hebrew words behind it mean something closer to sea monster, serpent, or in several places jackal.
The word doing most of the work is tannīn. It is used of the great sea creatures God makes on the fifth day (Gen. 1:21), of the thing Moses' staff becomes before Pharaoh (Exod. 7:9–12), and of a monster in the sea that God will punish (Isa. 27:1). The King James renders several of these as dragon; most modern versions say serpent or sea monster.
Then there is Leviathan, who gets a chapter to himself. Job 41 describes a creature nothing can hold, with scales shut tight as a seal, whose breath kindles coals and out of whose mouth go burning lamps. That is the closest the Hebrew Bible comes to a dragon as a modern reader pictures one.
The New Testament is unambiguous, because it is in Greek. Revelation 12:9 names ho drakōn ho megas, the great dragon, and identifies him with the serpent of Eden and with Satan. That is the same word Greek myth uses for Ladon and for the serpent of Colchis.
So the honest answer is that the dragon is in the Bible, but it arrives in Greek. The Hebrew has monsters; the Greek has a drakōn.
In the Codex. The Codex uses the same word, and uses it of a creature that is bound rather than killed, which is also what happens to the dragon of Revelation 12.
Further in
Acenes of Sparta: The Dragon Slayer
A dragon is the reason the 300 died. Leonidas used the magic of the gods to bind Kalaxes beneath Taygetus, and the price was his life and his men's. Sixty-two years later a seven-year-old of the agoge falls into the dragon's crypt and inherits the unpaid balance.
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