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Summary
- The King James Bible says “dragon” 19 times and “dragons” 16 times, 35 in all: 22 in the Old Testament and 13 in Revelation.
- Thirteen of the Old Testament “dragons” are jackals, because early English Bibles, the King James among them, gave the same English to two Hebrew words that look alike, tannin and tannim.
- The real Hebrew tannin is a serpent or a great sea monster, and Genesis counts the great sea creatures among the good things God made.
- The prophets call Pharaoh and the king of Babylon dragons, monsters that swallow nations and claim the river as their own.
- The great red dragon of Revelation is Satan, “that old serpent”, who is cast out of heaven, bound, and at last thrown into the lake of fire.
- Catholic and Orthodox Bibles hold three more dragon passages: Bel and the Dragon in Daniel 14, a proverb in Sirach 25, and Mordecai’s dream of two dragons in the Greek Esther.
Bibliography (Click to show)
- Bible text: King James Version (counts from the Project Gutenberg KJV, eBook #10, without the Apocrypha), passages quoted from Genesis 1:21; 3:1; Job 30:29; 41:19, 21; Psalms 74:13; 148:7; Isaiah 27:1; 35:7; 43:20; 51:9; Jeremiah 9:11; 51:34; Ezekiel 29:3; Micah 1:8; Lamentations 4:3; 1 Peter 5:8; Revelation 5:5; 12:3–5, 7, 9, 11; 13:2; 16:13; 20:2, 10, via BibleGateway. Daniel 14:22–26, Sirach 25:23 and Esther 11:6 from the Douay-Rheims Bible (1899 American edition).
- The King James Version of the Bible, Project Gutenberg eBook #10.
- Strong’s Hebrew 8577, tannin, with the Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon (1906) and the NAS Exhaustive Concordance, Bible Hub.
- Strong’s Hebrew 8565, tan (jackal), with Brown-Driver-Briggs, Bible Hub.
- Strong’s Hebrew 8568, tannah, Bible Hub.
- Strong’s Greek 1404, drakon, with Thayer’s Greek-English Lexicon, Bible Hub.
- Tim Chaffey, “Tannin: Sea Serpent, Dinosaur, Snake, Dragon, or Jackal?”, Answers Research Journal, Answers in Genesis, 8 August 2012.
- Church of England, Articles of Religion (the Thirty-nine Articles), Article VI.
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