BIBLE HISTORY DAILY

Hazor and the Seven-Headed Serpent

A seal from Tel Hazor dipicting a warrior fighting a seven-headed serpent. Courtesy Manuel Cimadevilla, The Selz Foundation Hazor Excavations in Memory of Yigael Yadin.

What do a Mesopotamian cylinder seal, a Greek vase, and the Book of Revelation have in common? Seven-headed serpents. The only issue is that scholars are not certain why. Publishing in the journal Near Eastern Archaeology, Christoph Uehlinger of the University of Zurich believes a small stamp seal discovered at Tel Hazor in northern Israel may finally provide a clue as to how the myth of the seven-headed serpent was transmitted between cultures across the millennia.

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The Hero of Hazor

While there is no way to know whether the small seal is Israelite or Phoenician, one thing is certain: Its iconography of a hero fighting a seven-headed serpent connects it to a long tradition of similar mythological depictions. The scene, carved into the seal’s face, depicts a warrior grasping a seven-headed snake with one hand while attacking it with a spear in the other. Behind the warrior are three hybrid creatures, including a griffin, a scarab with feathered wings, and a winged cobra. Other discernable features include two monkeys and an Egyptian-style ankh. Excavated on the acropolis of Tel Hazor, the seal dates on stylistic and stratigraphy grounds to the eighth century BCE.

Drawing of the Hazor seal. Courtesy Ulrike Zurkinden, Stamp Seals of the Southern Levant Project.

While depictions of heroes and deities fighting seven-headed serpents occur throughout history, they are quite unique and often found centuries apart and in different regions from one another. However, the similarities in these depictions have led many scholars to try to connect the imagery and the underlying traditions, even when there is little evidence to link the various examples. According to Uehlinger, the Hazor seal fills at least one gap in the chain of transmission—how the imagery made its way into the Bible.

The earliest attestations of the theme show up in third-millennium Mesopotamia in both pictorial and literary sources. There, the warrior god Ninurta is often credited with having slain a seven-headed serpent, along with other monsters. From Mesopotamia, the theme spread northwest to Ebla in Syria, where the feat was attributed to the storm god Haddu. By the second millennium, it made its way to Ugarit on the Levantine coast, where both the goddess Anat and the god Baal are seen fighting the serpent, who there was associated with the sea and variously named Tunnan (Dragon) or Litan (twisting one).

From Ugarit, the theme next appears in the Hebrew Bible. Throughout the Hebrew Bible, including in Psalm 74:13–14, it is Israel’s God Yahweh that defeats the monsters Tannin (the Hebrew version of Tunnan) and Leviathan (the Hebrew version of Litan). While the biblical account does not specify that either monster is a seven-headed serpent, the use of the same names demonstrates the biblical author’s creative reinterpretation of the theme, likely relying on his audience’s familiarity with the cultural origins of Tannin and Leviathan. Interestingly, however, a monstrous beast with seven heads reemerges in both the New Testament (Revelation 12:3) and the Babylonian Talmud (Qiddushin 29b). Meanwhile, Greek depictions of Heracles fighting the Lernaean Hydra from the sixth century BCE likewise display a warrior in combat against a seven-headed serpent and are nearly identical to the Mesopotamian depictions from two millennia earlier.

Heracles and Iolaos fighting the Lernaean Hydra (c. Sixth Century BCE). Courtesy Louvre Museum, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Appearing across multiple cultures over the course of four millennia, the theme of the warrior fighting the seven-headed serpent is certainly a pervasive one, but also one with an interesting habit of disappearing from the textual and archaeological record, only to reappear centuries later in a different place. But it is objects like the Tel Hazor seal that may hold clues for how such myths travel. Showing up in eighth-century BCE Hazor, the seal hints at the transmission from Ugarit to the Northern Kingdom of Israel, from Isaael to Judah, and from Judah to the biblical authors. At the end of the day, the seal reminds us that in archaeology, we are only ever working with part of the picture.

Editor’s Note: the seal was found in the “The Selz Foundation Hazor Excavations in Memory of Yigael Yadin” carried out by the Institute of Archaeology, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2022, directed by Prof. Amnon Ben-Tor and Igor Kreimerman.

Related reading in Bible History Daily:

How the Serpent in the Garden Became Satan

Biblical Monsters

All-Access members, read more in the BAS Library:

The Serpent

The Divine Warrior in His Tent

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