Dragons, Jackals, and Bible Translators
There is a Hebrew word that we transliterate as tan, with the feminine form tannah, which refers to jackals. It occurs, for instance, in Malachi 1:3, where God declares that, according to the NIV,
“Esau I have hated, and I have turned his hill country into a wasteland and left his inheritance to the desert jackals.”
That is straightforward, and it makes excellent sense in the context. But here is the problem. From the same root, there is also another word, 'tannin', which usually means a regular snake or serpent but can also signify a monster, sea serpent, or sea monster.
On multiple occasions, the context and the sense of a passage demand the word jackal, as in a wild creature that inhabits waste places and deserted cities. Yet repeatedly, translators read this as referring to a serpent or, commonly, a dragon, who has no business in those deserts and wastelands.
There are a couple of passages in Isaiah where it is quite obvious that the author is talking about jackals, yet translations regularly read this as dragons or sea monsters.
In Psalm 91.13, “you” are given the power to trample the lion and the tannin, and that juxtaposition suggests a fierce, furry carnivore. Yet from earliest times, and the Greek translations of the Septuagint, the word becomes a dragon, and that is then taken over into Latin. That usage continued into Luther’s German and into English. The KJV reads the young lion and the dragon shalt thou trample under feet.
In Jeremiah 49.33, the NIV accurately translates.
“Hazor will become a haunt of jackals, a desolate place forever. No one will live there; no people will dwell in it.”
That is plain and uncontroversial. But the older traditions, duly followed by the King James version, it proclaims:
"And Hazor shall be a dwelling for dragons and a desolation forever, there shall no man abide there, nor any son of man dwell in it."
In Malachi 1:3, God declares that he has abandoned Esau’s inheritance to the desert jackals (NIV). The KJV reads, “I hated Esau, and laid his mountains and his heritage waste for the dragons of the wilderness.”
Probably, a phrase like “a haunt for jackals” had become proverbial for ruin, but that is altogether lost in later renderings. Um, what dragons of the wilderness are we referring to?
Sometimes, the zoological confusion becomes outrageous. In Lamentations 4.3, in the NIV, we read that
"Even jackals offer their breasts to nurse their young, but my people have become heartless like ostriches in the desert."
That makes great sense: the people of Israel are condemned as lacking even the basic natural instinct of those nasty jackals. In the KJV, we encounter the mind-boggling vision of the lactating sea dragon:
"Even the sea monsters draw out the breast; they give suck to their young ones."
Whales and dolphins do not have external nipples. Instead, their nipples are enclosed within mammary slits. Upon stimulation of the calf's nudging, the nipple is exposed, and the calf positions itself such that the nipple is at the gape of the calf's jaw for feeding. But are we talking about a dragon?
There are several other examples of such confusion – in Psalms, Job, Isaiah, and Jeremiah – but these are representative.
It would be easy to say here that Early Modern English speakers had little idea of the natural world of the ancient Near East and had never met a jackal.
But in every instance that we are describing here, the confusion dates back to the Septuagint translators, who were Jews working in Egypt between around 270 and 120 BCE, and who definitely shared the same natural world as the original Biblical authors, including jackals.
So familiar were jackals in the Egyptian setting that the god Anubis was very widely represented with the head of that animal.
Yet in the Septuagint passages in Psalm 91 and Lamentations, the jackals have already become dragons. In the Jeremiah passage, they are 'strouthon', meaning – what? Ostriches? Or possibly sparrows?
In Malachi, the specific creatures have been lost altogether in favour of a generalized description of ruin and annihilation.
For whatever reason, the fairly obvious and widespread jackals have been systematically ejected or censored. Might the Egyptian-based translators not have wanted their scriptural text to refer to an animal so closely associated with the pagan gods of that country? Perhaps.
Those prejudices are reflected in the fourth-century Latin Vulgate of Jerome, which became the Biblical text for the overwhelming majority of Latin Christians for well over a millennium.
Jerome knew his Hebrew very well indeed and also knew the traditional natural world of the Near East. But in each of what should have been the “jackal” settings, Jerome inserted dragons wherever he could:
- Psalm 91.13 (Ps. 90 in the Vulgate ordering) – leonem et draconem
- Jeremiah 49.33 – habitaculum draconum
- Malachi 1.3 – et haereditatem ejus in dracones deserti
In his despair, Job laments how he wanders through the darkness alone, like a sneaking nocturnal creature. In the NIV, Job 30:29 appropriately and sensibly renders the Hebrew taNiym,
“I have become a brother of jackals, a companion of owls.”
But the Latin Vulgate “dragonizes” the original, to Frater fui draconum, et socius struthionum. The KJV follows this as
“I am a brother to dragons and a companion to owls.”
The same mess occurs at Micah 1.8, where the sensible pairing of jackals and owls has given way to the odd.
“I will make a wailing like the dragons.” (Luther had “ich muß klagen wie die Drachen”).
Jerome ventured even further into zoological oddity at Lamentations 4.3, where the motherly creature that lovingly bares its breast for its young is a "lamia", which properly means a night-hag or vampire:
"Sed et lamiae nudaverunt mammam, lactaverunt catulos suos."
The history of such mistranslations is instructive and sobering. One surprising point is just how early some of these errors or odd tangents occurred. The Septuagint was composed by Jews at a time when the Second Temple still flourished and when there should have been plenty of Palestine-based scholars available to discuss and debate the original meanings of words.
Yet the translators ploughed ahead with their particular interpretations, no matter how little logical sense they sometimes made. There is a sizable amount of literature on the quirks and tendencies of those Septuagint translators, which were sometimes quite marked, and resulted in some fairly loaded and intrusive renderings of the text.
And that is in the ancient world, never mind what other flaws and byways were open to more modern scholars, who were much further removed from that Jewish matrix.
We should also recall that the Septuagint, with all its weirdnesses and its dragons, was what constituted “the Bible” for the earliest Christians, like St. Paul, and for the Patristic centuries.
Was the Leviathan a Dragon or a Jackal?
There are several references to “leviathan” (Lə vīʹ ȧ thȧn) in the Old Testament it is an ancient sea creature, meaning “coiled one,” subdued by God. A serpentine form is indicated in Isa. 27:1 (“Leviathan the fleeing serpent … the twisting serpent,” NRSV).
In one instance, the Hebrew word for “leviathan” is used as a synonym for earthly kings and princes, possibly Pharaoh (Isaiah 27:1). In another instance, it is translated as “mourning” (Job 3:8).
In Job 41:1, the Leviathan has been identified by interpreters as a crocodile. In ancient Egypt, the crocodile could symbolize royal power, yet it was a hunted animal.
The only reference to a “tame” and fully demythologized Leviathan is found in Psa 104:26. This verse depicts Leviathan as just another one of God’s creatures, “playing” in the water
PHILIP JENKINS
