Dragons in the Bible: 35 Times in the KJV, and What They Mean

The King James translation speaks of dragons 35 times, and more than a third of them were jackals. The rest of its Old Testament dragons are serpents and sea monsters, and the 13 in the New Testament all belong to Revelation, where the dragon is Satan himself.

So one English word covers a desert animal, a snake and a monster of the deep, and what they share is the hand that rules them. Isaiah looked ahead to a day when the Lord “shall slay the dragon that is in the sea” (Isaiah 27:1), and centuries later John saw the great dragon “cast out” of heaven and heard his true name (Revelation 12:9). Every dragon in Scripture stands somewhere between those two verses, and every one of them stands under God.

The King James Version’s 35 dragons fall into six groups, by the Hebrew or Greek word behind them:

Where	KJV says	Original word	What it is
13 verses of lament, ruin and drought	dragons	tannim, tannot (Hebrew)	jackals
Deuteronomy 32:33; Psalm 91:13	dragon, dragons	tannin	venomous serpents
Psalms 74:13, 148:7; Isaiah 27:1, 51:9	dragon, dragons	tannin	sea monsters
Jeremiah 51:34; Ezekiel 29:3	dragon	tannin	a devouring monster, said of a king
Nehemiah 2:13	dragon well	tannin	a spring outside Jerusalem
Revelation 12, 13, 16 and 20	dragon (13 times)	drakon (Greek)	Satan

The thirteen jackal verses are Job 30:29, Psalm 44:19, Isaiah 13:22, 34:13, 35:7 and 43:20, Jeremiah 9:11, 10:22, 14:6, 49:33 and 51:37, Micah 1:8 and Malachi 1:3, though the Hebrew wording of Malachi 1:3 is uncertain. Ezekiel 29:3 is written tannim in the Hebrew, but lexicons read it as tannin. In Revelation the word comes thirteen times in twelve verses, because Revelation 12:7 has it twice: “Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels.”

That makes 22 in the Old Testament and 13 in the New, with “dragon” 19 times and “dragons” 16. These are counts of the whole words in the standard King James text, without the Apocrypha, and if you read another Bible you will find another total. A modern translation such as the New American Standard Bible reads “jackals” in these thirteen verses and “serpent” or “sea monster” in most of the others, so its dragons are far fewer.

It happened because two Hebrew words look and sound almost alike. Tannin means a serpent, a dragon or a sea monster; the Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew lexicon defines it as “serpent, dragon, sea-monster.” Tannim is the plural of a different word, tan, which the same lexicon defines as “jackal, howling mournfully in waste places.” Many early English Bibles gave both words the same English, and the King James Version of 1611 kept that reading, so the jackal verses filled with dragons.

Read the verses and you can hear the jackals in them. When Micah mourns over his people, he says, “I will make a wailing like the dragons, and mourning as the owls” (Micah 1:8), and that is the howl of the jackal at night. Job, sitting in his grief, cries, “I am a brother to dragons, and a companion to owls” (Job 30:29). In Lamentations the King James Bible even has “sea monsters” that “draw out the breast, they give suck to their young ones” (Lamentations 4:3), which would have sea monsters nursing their young. Brown-Driver-Briggs reads that verse as jackals too. On how the confusion came about, that standard lexicon and a young-earth creationist agree. Tim Chaffey of Answers in Genesis, which reads some biblical creatures as dinosaurs, writes that “many early English translations of the Bible equated these two terms and rendered tannim as ‘dragons’ instead of ‘jackals.’”

In the prophets the jackals belong to ruined places. “I will make Jerusalem heaps, and a den of dragons,” God warns through Jeremiah (Jeremiah 9:11). Yet the same animals appear in one of Isaiah’s brightest promises, where the dry land blooms and “in the habitation of dragons, where each lay, shall be grass with reeds and rushes” (Isaiah 35:7), and the place of howling becomes a meadow.

The true tannin of the Old Testament is a picture of power that no person can master, and Scripture places it under God from the first page. On the fifth day “God created great whales,” the tanninim, the great creatures of the sea, “and God saw that it was good” (Genesis 1:21). No sea monster in Genesis fights the Creator; it is one of his works.

The psalmists and prophets use the same creature to praise the God who saved Israel, and the more terrible they make the monster, the greater the God who breaks it. “Thou didst divide the sea by thy strength: thou brakest the heads of the dragons in the waters,” says Psalm 74:13, remembering the Red Sea. Isaiah calls on the Lord’s arm to wake as it did when it “cut Rahab, and wounded the dragon” (Isaiah 51:9).

Twice the prophets give the name to a king. Ezekiel calls Pharaoh “the great dragon that lieth in the midst of his rivers, which hath said, My river is mine own, and I have made it for myself” (Ezekiel 29:3), and Jeremiah gives Jerusalem’s lament over Babylon’s king: “he hath swallowed me up like a dragon, he hath filled his belly with my delicates” (Jeremiah 51:34). A ruler who claims the river as his own making, or swallows a nation whole, has become a monster in God’s sight. The great sea beast Leviathan stands beside these dragons in Psalm 74 and Isaiah 27, and what the Bible says about Leviathan follows him through Job, the Psalms and the prophets.

He is Satan, and Revelation says so in plain words twice. John sees “a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads” (Revelation 12:3), one dragon with seven heads. He stands before a woman about to give birth, ready “to devour her child as soon as it was born,” but the child “was caught up unto God, and to his throne” (Revelation 12:4–5). Then war breaks out in heaven, and the dragon loses: “the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world” (Revelation 12:9). “That old serpent” carries us back to Eden, where “the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field” (Genesis 3:1).

On earth the dragon works through others. He gives the beast from the sea “his power, and his seat, and great authority” (Revelation 13:2), and unclean spirits come “out of the mouth of the dragon” (Revelation 16:13). But his end is written as surely as his name. An angel “laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years” (Revelation 20:2), and at the last “the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone” (Revelation 20:10).

The heavenly voice in Revelation 12 tells how God’s people beat him: “they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony” (Revelation 12:11). There is no sword in that verse. The dragon is overcome by what Christ has done, and by the people who hold on to him.

The sea creatures of Genesis are called good, and the Psalms even call the dragons to worship: “Praise the LORD from the earth, ye dragons, and all deeps” (Psalm 148:7). The dragon of Revelation is another matter. He is evil, and the Bible means him to be.

Scripture lets one creature stand for opposite things. Peter warns that “your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour” (1 Peter 5:8), and Revelation calls Christ himself “the Lion of the tribe of Judah” (Revelation 5:5). The lion is not evil because the devil once roars like one; the Lion of Judah is the One who prevails. In the same way, a dragon in a story or a painting is not the devil just because it is a dragon. The better question to ask is what the story honours, and what it leads us to love.

Christians answer this in different ways. Young-earth creationists, such as the writers at Answers in Genesis, read some of these creatures as dinosaurs. Answers in Genesis “has often promoted the idea that many of the characteristics of historical (often considered mythological) dragons actually match those of certain dinosaurs,” and Chaffey concludes that the tanninim are “a group of serpentine creatures, rather than one specific type, with some living on land and some in the sea.” He also points out that the word “dinosaur” was coined only in 1841, and that before then such creatures were called dragons. Other readers take the sea monsters as poetry about God’s power over chaos, in the way the Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon reads Rahab, the dragon’s partner in Isaiah 51:9, as a “mythological personification of chaos.”

Whichever way we read the rest, thirteen of the King James Bible’s dragons were jackals, and those we can all set aside. The one fire-breathing creature in the Old Testament is Leviathan in Job 41, and Job never calls him a dragon: “Out of his mouth go burning lamps, and sparks of fire leap out… His breath kindleth coals, and a flame goeth out of his mouth” (Job 41:19, 21).

There are, in three more places, all in books that most Protestant Bibles leave out or print among the Apocrypha. The first is the story of Bel and the Dragon, which Catholic Bibles print as Daniel 14. The Babylonians worship “a great dragon,” and Daniel kills it “without sword or club”: he “took pitch, and fat, and hair, and boiled them together: and he made lumps, and put them into the dragon’s mouth, and the dragon burst asunder” (Daniel 14:22, 25–26, Douay-Rheims). The Church of England’s Thirty-nine Articles list “Bel and the Dragon” among the books the Church reads “for example of life and instruction of manners” but not “to establish any doctrine.”

Sirach uses the dragon in a proverb: “It will be more agreeable to abide with a lion and a dragon, than to dwell with a wicked woman” (Sirach 25:23, Douay-Rheims). And in the Greek additions to Esther, Mordecai dreams of “two great dragons” ready to fight (Esther 11:6, Douay-Rheims). A dragon in our own dreams is another question, and what it means to dream of a dragon takes it up, with Mordecai’s surprising answer.

Even the jackals of the old translation are given a verse of praise, where God says, “The beast of the field shall honour me, the dragons and the owls: because I give waters in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert, to give drink to my people, my chosen” (Isaiah 43:20).

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