Virtual Dig 2006

Yikes! Snakes and Scorpions!

God says in the Bible that snakes have to eat dust as punishment because one of them tempted Eve to eat the forbidden fruit.

Eat dust they may — but they don't seem to like it. A snake in a bucket of dirt makes an awful racket.

Snake in a bucket? That's where it might wind up as we scrape soil into plastic pails to clear the site of our church at Hippos.

We didn't get a good look at this little snake. It was gone in an instant after we poured out the pail. But in the meantime, we had a bucket that sounded like a giant's baby rattle as the snake whipped around trying to escape.

Poisonous? Probably not. Of the 40 kinds of snakes in Israel, few have venom: the Persian horned viper, black desert cobra and Palestine saw-scaled viper live in the deserts to the south — we think. The Palestinian viper, however, prefers cooler climates — like ours. Yikes!

So be careful picking up rocks. You might find a new slithery friend!
 

Glows in the Dark, Gives Rides

Look out for scorpions, too. Sometimes we find them scuttling for cover when we turn over a rock.

The scorpions we've seen so far are little ones, two to five centimeters. The biggest in Israel, we're told, is black and 20 centimeters long. We haven't seen one of those — yet.

Scorpions are arachnids, related to spiders. They live where it's hot. Scorpions have eight legs, claws like a crab, a long tail and six to 12 eyes. Mothers bear live young. The babies crawl onto their mother's back and ride around for several days. Scorpions are fluorescent — they glow in ultraviolet light. That's one way to spot them when they're most active, at night.

Scorpions are poisonous. They seize beetles and spiders in their claws and curl those long tails over their heads to sting the victim.

That tail stinger can kill a person. The World Health Organization reports only one recent death in Israel from a scorpion sting, in 1998. The deadliest places for scorpion stings are Mexico, with 84 deaths in 2001, and Egypt, with 78 deaths in 2000.

Egypt? That puts an edge on a passage in the Bible's book of Deuteronomy: Moses, who led the people of Israel out of captivity in Egypt, urges them to remember God, "who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, who led you through the great and terrible wilderness, an arid wasteland with poisonous snakes and scorpions."

Scorpions and -- Taxes?

Much later, when the Israelites' ruler Solomon died, the people asked his son Rehoboam to ease the burden of taxes and labor that
Solomon had imposed.

Solomon's wise old advisers agreed. But Rehoboam instead took his own friends' advice and told the people: "My father disciplined
you with whips, but I will discipline you with scorpions."

The new king meant he would make taxes and labor even harder — so his father's subjects broke away under a different king.
Afterwards there were two kingdoms, not one.

Scorpions give us some colorful language. Muqaddasi, a tenth-century Muslim geographer and historian, praised his
hometown of Jerusalem as “the most illustrious of cities.” But he also said it lacked learning and oppressed the poor. It was, he
wrote, like “a golden basin filled with scorpions."

Don't look Up

Did you know a huge scorpion hangs over you in the sky during the summer? Look for the constellation Scorpio's fishhook-shaped tail in the south. At this scorpion's heart is the giant red star Antares. By autumn, however, its tail is vanishing beneath the western horizon — like a giant scorpion scuttling under a really big rock.

In the Bible, Jesus gave some of his followers "authority to tread on snakes and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy; and nothing will hurt you."

Tread on them? We'd just as soon let the snakes slither away. The scorpions we whack with a pick — if we can get 'em before they
scuttle back under a rock.