The Sand-Viper, or Toxicoa—Its appearance and habits—Adder's poison—The Cockatrice, or Tsepha—The Yellow Viper—Ancient ideas concerning the Cockatrice—Power of its venom.

We now come to the species of snake which cannot be identified with any certainty, and will first take the word epheh.

Mr. Tristram believes that he has identified the Epheh of the Old Testament with the Sand-Viper, or Toxicoa. This reptile, though very small, and scarcely exceeding a foot in length, is a dangerous one, but its bite is not so deadly as that of the cobra or cerastes. It is variable in colour, and has angular white streaks on its body, with a row of whitish spots along the back. The top of the head is dark, and variegated with arrow-shaped white marks.

The Toxicoa is very plentiful in Northern Africa, Palestine, Syria, and the neighbouring countries, and, as it is exceedingly active, is held in some dread by the natives.

Another name of a poisonous snake occurs several times in the Old Testament. The word is tsepha, or tsiphÔni, and it is sometimes translated as Adder, and sometimes as Cockatrice. The word is rendered as Adder in Prov. xxiii. 32, where it is said that wine "biteth like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder." Even in this case, however, the word is rendered as Cockatrice in the marginal translation.

It is found three times in the Book of Isaiah. Ch. xi. 8: "The weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice' den." Also, ch. xiv. 29: "Rejoice not thou, whole Palestina, because the rod of him that smote thee is broken: for out of the serpent's (nachash) nest shall come forth a cockatrice (tsepha), and his fruit shall be a fiery flying serpent." The same word occurs again in ch. lix. 5: "They hatch cockatrice' eggs." In the prophet Jeremiah we again find the word: "For, behold, I will send serpents, cockatrices among you, which will not be charmed, and they shall bite you, saith the Lord."

Around this reptile a wonderful variety of legends have been accumulated. The Cockatrice was said to kill by its very look, "because the beams of the Cockatrice's eyes do corrupt the visible spirit of a man, which visible spirit corrupted all the other spirits coming from the brain and life of the heart, are thereby corrupted, and so the man dyeth."

The subtle poison of the Cockatrice infected everything near it, so that a man who killed a Cockatrice with a spear fell dead himself, by reason of the poison darting up the shaft of the spear and passing into his hand. Any living thing near which the Cockatrice passed was instantly slain by the fiery heat of its venom, which was exhaled not only from its mouth, but its sides. For the old writers, whose statements are here summarized, contrived to jumble together a number of miscellaneous facts in natural history, and so to produce a most extraordinary series of legends.

I should not have given even this limited space to such puerile legends, but for the fact that such stories as these were fully believed in the days when the Authorized Version of the Bible was translated. The translators of the Bible believed most heartily in the mysterious and baleful reptile, and, as they saw that the Tsepha of Scripture was an exceptionally venomous serpent, they naturally rendered it by the word Cockatrice.