BIBLE HISTORY DAILY

Snakes and Lizards as Food and Foe

Leviticus meets archaeology

The Bible has a complicated relationship with snakes and lizards. The serpent tempts Eve in Genesis 3. Fiery serpents afflict the Israelites in Numbers 21. Leviticus 11 places various reptiles within its laws about animals, food, and ritual impurity. However, long before any of these biblical texts were written, prehistoric people living in the southern Levant—identified by archaeologists as the Natufian culture—seem clearly to have thought about reptiles as food.

A team of researchers from the University of Haifa published a new study of the Natufian settlement of el-Wad Terrace on Mt. Carmel, providing a rather shocking glimpse of that much older moment. Examining more than 3,000 years of occupation, dating roughly from 15,000 to 11,700 years ago, the researchers found evidence that large snakes and lizards were repeatedly butchered and consumed.

The evidence comes from 20 stratified layers at el-Wad Terrace, where snake and lizard remains were surprisingly abundant, accounting for roughly 25 to 42 percent of the identified animal remains. Numbers alone, however, do not prove that people ate the reptiles. Snakes and lizards can enter archaeological deposits in other ways, but the bones provided a further clue.

One of the team’s most compelling discoveries is evidence of butchery. They identified 82 snake vertebrae bearing distinctive cut marks that suggest intentional slaughter. The marks occur in a consistent location on the vertebrae of large snakes, and some specimens show multiple parallel cuts consistent with a repeated cutting motion. These cut marks occur across time.

Three large reptiles dominate the assemblage: the European glass lizard, the large whip snake, and the eastern Montpellier snake. The glass lizard alone accounts for about 35 percent of the identified species, followed by the large whip snake at about 32 percent, and the Montpellier snake at about 22 percent. These were not equally easy—or safe—to catch. The glass lizard was large, slow-moving, and non-venomous. The large whip snake was faster and could deliver a strong bite. The eastern Montpellier snake was similarly large but also aggressive and mildly venomous. The researchers used differences like these to rank the reptiles according to the costs and benefits of hunting them.

Earlier Paleolithic assemblages in the region contain fewer snakes and lizards overall, along with a greater diversity of smaller species. Natufian assemblages from different locations, by contrast, show a strikingly similar preference for large-bodied reptiles. Statistical analysis found that the Natufian samples clustered together even at geographically disparate sites, as if there was a human preference for which snakes and lizards to hunt (as opposed to just eating whatever was locally available).

The researchers also found that reptile exploitation changed with the intensity of occupation. During el-Wad Terrace’s architectural stage—when habitation was most intensive and sedentism was at its greatest—the proportion of “edible” snakes and lizards increased. It declined during a later, less permanent phase of occupation. In other words, people relied more heavily on big reptiles when they were living at the site more intensively and permanently.

Long before snakes and lizards appeared in biblical laws and stories, people in the southern Levant were already hunting, butchering, and eating them. The evidence from el-Wad Terrace suggests that reptiles had been part of the human diet in the region for millennia before the Bible was written.

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Lauren K. McCormick is an assistant editor at Biblical Archaeology Review and a specialist in ancient Near Eastern religions, visual culture, and the Bible. She holds degrees in religion from Syracuse University, Duke University, New York University, and Rutgers University, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship on religion and the public conversation at Princeton University.

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