An asp is a viper, one of the deadly snakes in the Holy Land. The cockatrice is another venomous serpent. To appreciate the peaceful period when a little child may, without worry, play on the hole of a viper, consider the following episode.
A thirty-eight-year-old male student, large and sturdy, was working in the banana fields of a kibbutz near the Sea of Galilee. One day he tried to save a snake from the hands of other students who uncovered it and intended to kill it. When he picked it up with his fingers to remove it from danger, the viper somehow elongated itself, swung around, and sank its fangs into his forefinger.
Immediately, kibbutz personnel rushed him to a nearby hospital, where he remained for three days of observation. They released him, and after he spent a few hours at the BYU Jerusalem Center, the pain in his finger was still so intense that he was rushed in the middle of the night to the emergency room of a Jerusalem hospital. The student remained in the hospital for twelve more days. Doctors tried every kind of painkiller to ease his periodic agony. Now and then his whole body writhed with pain from his finger. The finger increased to double its normal size, and the tissues inside turned a black color. The doctors feared that they might have to amputate his finger and maybe even his hand.
The student was released from the Jerusalem hospital to fly back to the United States with his group, and there he was admitted to another medical center. Several months passed before he recovered completely from those venomous fangs that had sunk just a fraction of an inch into his finger. The poison might well have killed a smaller, more fragile individual.
That experience with a viper highlights the extraordinary changes that will prevail in the millennial era when formerly dangerous creatures will be pacific and playful.