ὄφις

ὄφις (ophis, "OH-fiss") is the ordinary Greek word for a snake, and the record gives it 108 occurrences across 46 works. The distribution runs first through history and then through scripture: the Histories (25), then Genesis and Numeri (Numbers, 7 each), Isaias (Isaiah) and Revelation (5 each), and the Theogony (4). It lives where portent and law and prophecy are written down.

Four lexicon entries hold the lemma, and what they record is a word that keeps leaving the animal behind. LSJ (Liddell–Scott–Jones, 1940) begins with "serpent" — the snake of Iliad 12.208 — then follows the shape outward: a serpent-form bracelet coiled on the arm; the constellation Serpens; a creeping plant; a kind of fish; even the skin-disease ὀφίασις (ophíasis, "snake-disease"). LSJ notes the word runs equivalent to δράκων (drakōn), the other serpent-word, and can turn metaphor — a "winged serpent," said of an arrow (A. Eu. 181). It even fixes a monument: the bronze three-headed serpent dedicated at Delphi (Hdt. 9.81). Beekes (Etymological Dictionary of Greek, Brill 2010), Chantraine (Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque, 1968–80), and Frisk (Griechisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 1960–72) all treat the word; Beekes and Frisk both carry the compound ὀφι-οῦχος (ophioûchos, "snake-holder"), the constellation the Latins called Angui-tenens, while Chantraine gathers the serpent-compounds under the stem ὀφιο- (ophio-). Beekes reaches for an inherited root, but the record leaves the deeper reconstruction unsettled.

The citable surfaces spread as widely as the senses: ὄφεος and ὄφεσι in Euripides' Bacchae, ὄφεις in Epictetus's Discourses, ὄφεων at 1 Corinthians 10.9, ὄφις at Deuteronomium 8 and twice in Ecclesiastes 10. The record names the creature again and again and rarely stops to describe it.

If the plainest word for a snake is also the shape of a bracelet and a pattern of stars, was the serpent to the Greeks an animal or a line?