Might "worm" in Psalms 22.3 refer to "wyrm"/"wurm"? [closed]

Solution 1:

The OED provides evidence of the now archaic "dragon" or "serpent" meaning as recently as 1867:

1867 W. Morris Life & Death of Jason x. 176 Therewith began A fearful battle betwixt worm and man.

For modern English, the dictionary has examples from 1475, 1526, 1616, 1667, 1716, 1778, 1785 and 1867, indicating it would be likely 16th century translators understood the serpent usage.

Indeed, the 16th century example is from Tyndale's bible itself:

1526 Bible (Tyndale) Acts xxviii. 4 When the men off the countree sawe the worme hange on hys honde.

It seems, then, that with rather full certainty we can say that Tyndale knew the dragon-meaning of worm. It is also likely that his contemporaries did as well.

To answer the further question of whether they intended the allusion, we'd should know what synonyms for worm existed in the 16th century. Were there synonyms the translators could have used but chose "worm" in favor of?

My quick look through the OED's historical thesaurus offers the following potentially relevant synonyms for earthworm:

• maddock, examples in 15th century, seems to refer more often to maggots
• easse, first example in 1582
• mad, first example in 1586

It doesn't seem, then, that the translators had many other choices to translate the original – indicating that while they knew the dragon allusion, they were not necessarily intending (perhaps similarly to how if you were to use the word worm today.

Also, this is premised on the idea that the Hebrew clearly refers to earthworms. Wiktionary, today, translates תוֹלַעַת as worm, but how did early Modern English translators understand the word? Were they literally, regardless of allusion, referring to earthworms? Or were they referring to something else or more vague?