Though they hide themselves in the top of Carmel, I will search and take them out there; and though they be hid from my sight in the bottom of the sea, there I will command the serpent, and it will bite them.
The ancients knew of them perhaps in the Persian gulf or perhaps the Red Sea . All are “highly venomous” and “very ferocious.” : “The virulence of their venom is equal to that of the “most” pernicious land-serpents.” All things, with their will or without it through animal instinct, as the serpent, or their savage passions, as the Assyrian, fulfill the will of God. As, at His command, the fish whom He had prepared, swallowed Jonah, for his preservation, so, at His “command, the serpent” should come forth from the recesses of the sea to the sinner’s greater suffering.