Job 41:1-5 1 Dost thou draw the crocodile by a hoop-net,
And dost thou sink his tongue into the line?! 2 Canst thou put a rush-ring into his nose,
And pierce his cheeks with a hook? 3 Will he make many supplications to thee,
Or speak flatteries to thee? 4 Will he make a covenant with thee,
To take him as a perpetual slave? 5 Wilt thou play with him as a little bird,
And bind him for thy maidens?
In Job 3:8, לויתן signified the celestial dragon, that causes the eclipses of the sun (according to the Indian mythology, râhu the black serpent, and ketu the red serpent); in Psa 104:26 it does not denote some great sea-saurian after the kind of the hydrarchus of the primeval world, but directly the whale, as in the Talmud (Lewysohn, Zoologie des Talm. §178f.). Elsewhere, however, the crocodile is thus named, and in fact as תּנּין also, another appellation of this natural wonder of Egypt, as an emblem of the mightiness of Pharaoh (vid., on Psa 74:13.), as once again the crocodile itself is called in Arab. el - fir‛annu. The Old Testament language possesses no proper name for the crocodile; even the Talmudic makes use of קרוקתא = κροκόδειλος (Lewysohn, §271). לויתן is the generic name of twisted, and תנין long-extended monsters. Since the Egyptian name of the crocodile has not been Hebraized, the poet contents himself in תּמשׁך with making a play upon its Egyptian, and in Arab. tmsâḥ , timsâḥ ,
Arabized name (Ew. §324, a). To wit, it is called in Coptic temsah, Hierogl. (without the art.) msuh (emsuh), as an animal that creeps “out of the egg (suh).”
In Job 41:1, Ges. and others falsely translate: Canst thou press its tongue down with a cord; השׁקיע does not signify demergere = deprimere, but immergere: canst thou sink its tongue into the line, i.e., make it bite into the hook on the line, and canst thou thus draw it up? Job 41:1 then refers to what must happen in order that the משׁך of the msuh may take place. Herodotus (and after him Aristotle) says, indeed, ii. 68, the crocodile has no tongue; but it has one, only it cannot stretch it out, because the protruding part has grown to the bottom of the mouth, while otherwise the saurians have a long tongue, that can be stretched out to some length. In Job 41:2 the order of thought is the same: for first the Nile fishermen put a ring through the gills or nose of valuable fish; then they draw a cord made of rushes (σχοῖνον) through it, in order to put them thus bound into the river. “As a perpetual slave,” Job 41:4 is intended to say: like one of the domestic animals. By צפּור, Job 41:5, can hardly be meant צפּרת הכּרמים, the little bird of the vineyard, i.e., according to a Talmud. usage of the language, the golden beetle (Jesurun, p. 222), or a pretty eatable grasshopper (Lewysohn, §374), but, according to the words of Catullus, Passer deliciae meae puellae, the sparrow, Arab. ‛asfûr - an example of a harmless living plaything (שׂחק בּ, to play with anything, different from Psa 104:26, where it is not, with Ew., to be translated: to play with it, but: therein).