Monday, April 30, 2012

Herps and the Bible

The Bible is filled with all sorts of interesting stories and parables.  Surprisingly, it also includes stories of herps!  For a while, I was considering different areas of literature and culture that cover herps.  There are many medical symbols, strange myths, and cultural traditions involving the use of snakes or other herptiles.  I couldn’t quite settle on any specific topic when it occurred to me while at church, the Bible has lots of herp stories!  The following paragraphs are some sweet accounts of herps from the Bible. 

            First and foremost, we find herps in Genesis 3.  This chapter takes place after the creation of the Earth and of man.  The Devil, in the form of a serpent, appears to Eve and deceives her by convincing her to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.  God forbade Adam and Eve to eat the fruit of this tree, but the Devil told Eve that if she ate of the fruit, she would have her eyes opened and she would know good from evil.  Eve saw the fruit to be pleasing and ate.  She also shared the fruit with Adam.  Later when God found out, He was greatly disappointed and said to the serpent (Devil), “Cursed are you above all the livestock and all the wild animals! You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life.  And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.”  Look at that, a snake is stated to forever be striking at the heel of man way back in Genesis.  I find that really neat.

            Another great account of herps in the Bible is leviathan.  The leviathan is mentioned six times in total, but given a detailed description in Job 41.  Job says, “His back has rows of shields tightly sealed together; each is so close to the next that no air can pass between… His chest is as hard as rock, hard as a lower millstone.”  That sounds an awful lot like scales to me.  I think it is quite possible that leviathan was in fact a form of reptile.  Some scholars deem leviathan to be interpreted as a certain dragon or sea monster.  I can’t really argue with those conclusions or speculations.  The facts look rather straight forward and plain to me. 
A fun one similar to the leviathan is the behemoth.  Behemoth is described in Job 40:15-24.  Job describes the behemoth as “limbs as strong as copper, his bones as a load of iron… Does he lie under shadows, in the cover of the reeds and the swamp? …Behold, he plunders the river…”  By this description, I could also see there being an argument for behemoth also being a herptile.  Who knows?  What do you think?
Did you know Moses and Aaron were some of the first herpetologists?  Exodus 7:8-13 gives an account of Aaron throwing down his staff in the presence of Pharaoh and it becoming a snake.  Pharaoh’s magicians did the same, but Aaron’s staff, now a snake, swallowed the other serpents.  In the next chapter (specifically 8:2-14), God sent a plague of frogs upon the land of Egypt.  “The Nile shall swarm with frogs that shall come up into your house and into your bedroom and on your bed and into the houses of your servants and your people and on all your servants… and the frogs came up and covered the land of Egypt.”  Dang.  Can you imagine how many frogs that was?  I would say, “Frog legs for dinner!”  But I don’t think the presence of these frogs was a pleasant scenario…  I guess even back in the times of the Bible people didn’t like herps.  Frogs don’t seem to have a very good rep going for them.  I really don’t see why people don’t like them so much.  I think they’re rather cute (when they’re not peeing on me).
These are simply a few of the accounts of herps in the Bible.  This Bible is not limited to just this list of stories about snakes, dragons and frogs.  There are plenty more really interesting stories.  There is a cool story in Numbers 21 of Moses raising a staff with a serpent wound around it.  Any of the Israelites bit by venomous snakes that looked upon this staff were healed.  Another cool story is when Paul, a founder of the early church, was making a fire when he was bit by a viper (Family Viperidae??).  Then he suffered no harm from the bite and simply shook off the snake!  That’s pretty cool.  Look up these stories!  You might be surprised at what you find!  Happy searching!

Work Cited
Holy Bible: New International Version. Grand Rapids, MI. Zondervan. 1984.

1 comment:

To Love What is Mortal said...

Interesting! Also interesting that most of them seem to be viewed with fear or a bad thing. No wonder western religions have failed to appreciate them. I wonder if Paul received a dry bite? He'd be interested in the Gibbons & Dorcas study we discussed!