The Good and Evil Serpent (121 page)

14.	“fiery serpent”	Deut 8:15	N
15.	“flying serpent”	Isa 14:29	P for Israel
		Isa 30:6	N for Israel
16.	“winged-serpents”	Isa 6:2–6	P
17.	“adder”	Gen 49:17	P for Israel
18.	“dragon”	Ps 91:13, Job 3:8	N

To discover eighteen different, but sometimes interrelated, expressions for snakes and serpents in the Hebrew Bible may be a surprise to biblical experts, especially when approximately thirteen nouns are known to denote a snake in Aramaic and Syriac, and these cognate languages have a vast vocabulary that covers more centuries than biblical Hebrew, and include the influence of Arabic.
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It is not clear how many words for “snake” exist in Aramaic and Syriac because of the lack of a taxonomy of snakes and the vast corpus of texts (some not edited critically) that covers over two thousand years. Here is a list featuring the major words for snake in Aramaic and Syriac:

	= perhaps an indeterminate type of snake that causes fear 212
	= Hebrew loanword
	“cobra”? [see below]
	viper? 213
14	= Hebrew [cf. Peshitta of Isa 14:29]
	= 215
216	= snake
	= Hebrew and other Hebrew nouns for “snake” 217
218	= a type of viper? 219
	= Leviathan or “snake”
	= some type of large snake 220