The Modern Hebrew word for turtle and tortoise is צָב, but this is not the word's meaning in the Bible (Lev. 11:29), where it refers to a kind of "unclean" lizard – in all likelihood the spiny-tailed lizard, to which its Arabic (ضَبّ) and Syriac (ܥܒܐ) cognates refer. >

This was unknown to the translators of the Septuagint, who translated the word as "crocodile," which St. Jerome followed in his Vulgate. But later Jewish scholars in the Arab world such as Jonah ibn Janah and Maimonides correctly identified the creature as a kind of lizard. >

This was not so clear to Jewish scholars in Europe who did not speak Arabic and thus were not aware of the Arabic cognate, such as Rashi (11 c.). He identified the biblical צב with the toad. It was his contemporary Tobiah ben Eliezer, who first identified the creature with the >

tortoise. What evidently led Tobiah to this conclusion was the fact that another unrelated biblical homograph צב (Num. 7:3; Isa. 66:20) was understood to mean covered wagon. It was only logical to assume that the lizard in question was a "covered lizard." >

This identification was taken up by Baruch Lindau in his 1788 Hebrew scientific textbook Reshit Limudim, and was followed by later writers of the Haskalah (the Jewish Enlightenment) in the 19th century, and eventually in the 20th century by the speakers of Modern Hebrew.