tan

This is the wild dog of the dry country: a scavenger that runs in packs, dens in rubble, and can be heard a long way off at night. Nobody in the Bible hunts one, sells one, or keeps one. Hebrew names it almost only in the plural, and almost only in poetry and prophecy, because the animal is brought in for what its presence proves rather than for itself.

What its presence proves is that the people are gone. The prophets made a fixed sentence out of it and then said it over one place after another:

• Jerusalem is handed over to become a lair for them
• the towns of Judah are left as a lair for them
• Babylon becomes heaps of rubble, a lair for them
• Hazor is to be their lair forever
• the ruined strongholds of Edom become their haunt

The buildings can still be standing. In one line the animals are in the pleasant palaces themselves, and that is the sting: the rooms are intact and the animals have them.

From there the word reaches into human grief. The long carrying cry of these animals is the sound a mourner claims for himself, so Job says he has become their brother and Micah says he will howl as they do. The same creature that marks a ruined city marks a ruined life. Underneath all of it the animal stays a real animal with needs of its own: it nurses its young, it gasps for air when the water dries up, and it is named among the creatures that will thank God when he puts streams in the desert.

Ezekiel takes up a funeral song over Pharaoh and calls him two things at once: a lion among the nations, and this creature lying in the water. What follows is all water. He thrashes in his rivers, muddies the streams with his feet, and tramples their channels. Nothing in it fits a desert scavenger.

The spelling is the difficulty. The written letters here are exactly what the desert animal looks like in the plural, yet the verse needs one creature, in water, and the ancient translators all read one monster. So the standard lexicons and the major commentators take the word here to be a separate Hebrew noun, the one for the sea monster or serpent (תַּנִּין), with the wrong letter at the end. Three chapters earlier Pharaoh is called the same thing with the same spelling, and there it is read that way without argument.

Which creature that is remains argued. Some hear the Nile crocodile, the animal Egypt itself used as a badge of royal power. Some hear the old sea dragon of the stories Israel's neighbors told, borrowed to make Egypt sound cosmic rather than merely strong. Most now think Ezekiel meant both at once, because the taunt only works if the great beast in the water turns out to be something you can hook and drag ashore.