Charles Ellicott Commentary Psalms 74:13

"Thou didst divide the sea by thy strength: Thou brakest the heads of the sea-monsters in the waters." — Psalms 74:13 (ASV)

Thou. — Verse after verse this emphatic pronoun recurs, as if challenging the Divine Being to contradict.

Divide. — Literally, break up.

Dragons. — Hebrew, tannînîm, not to be confused with tannîm (Psalms 44:19, where see Note). It is the plural of tannín, which always indicates some aquatic monster. In Genesis 1:21 it is translated whale, so here by Symmachus. The Septuagint (compare Vulgate) rendered this word and leviathan (in the next verse) by δράκων, and indeed, the parallelism indicates monsters of a similar, if not the same, kind.

Regarding leviathan, the detailed and faithful description of the crocodile in Job 41 leaves no doubt. Therefore, we conclude that the tannin—here as in Ezekiel 29:3, Ezekiel 32:2 (margin), Isaiah 27:1, and Isaiah 51:9 (where it is also, as here, joined with leviathan)—as an emblem of Egypt, was some great saurian, perhaps the alligator.

The derivation from a root implying extend favors this explanation (Tristram, Natural History of the Bible, pp. 260, 261). Besides its abundance, another fact leading to the crocodile becoming an emblem of Egypt was the adoration paid to it (See Herodotus, ii. 69).

In the waters. — Literally, on the waters.