found in the Mount Carmel caves and some lived in the Zerka river, still known as Crocodile River, near Caesarea, until the first decade of the 20th cent. and perhaps rather later. Thus the crocodile would be well-known to the Israelites before the exodus and familiar to at least some of the writers throughout the biblical era. In EGYPT it was venerated as a symbol of sunrise. Crocodiles were sometimes reared and cared for in the temples, and embalmed when they died; because they fed on corpses and