BIT AND BRIDLE (מֶ֫תֶג, H5496, bridle; רֶ֫סֶנ֒, H8270, halter; χαλινός, G5903, bit or bridle). In neither the Heb. of the OT nor the Gr. of the NT does there appear to be a word for “bit.” The word commonly rendered “bridle” in both languages includes the whole controlling harness of the horse’s head. The Heb. metheg commonly means “bridle,” but includes the “bit,” while resen means “halter” (Gesenius, Hebrew Lexicon, p. 607 for references). The word metheg is used fig. only in 2 Samuel 8:1, if the word of which it forms a part in a difficult text can be rendered “the bridle of the mother-city” (NBD., p. 818 s.v. Metheg-ammah). The NT uses chalinos twice (James 3:3; Rev 14:20). The meaning of the first is undoubtedly “bit,” i.e. the stomion, or mouthpiece, as distinct from the hēniai, or reins. This synechdoche may be paralleled from Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides (Liddell and Scott, Greek Lexicon, s.v.) The opposite is true in the second case (Rev 14:20); chalinos is there the “reins.” The same phenomenon is seen in the overlapping of frenum and habena, a sing. and pl. in Lat. (Lewis and Short, Latin Dictionary, s.v.). The Rom. frenum lupatum, or saw-toothed bit, could be a cruel and damaging piece of harness. The Jordanian Archaeological Museum has a bit of Syrian origin, from the second millennium b.c., with spiked rings, the spikes turned inward at each end. It was designed to prick the outside of the animal’s mouth. There is a jointed bit of modern form from the same era.