Snail

The snail surfaces in UPDV at a single point — a poetic simile in the Psalter, where the creature's slow trail of slime becomes a figure for dissolution.

The melting trail

The imprecatory Psalm 58 piles up images of things that fail or vanish, and the snail takes its place among them: "[Let them be] as a snail which melts and passes away, [Like] the untimely birth of a woman; may they never see the sun" (Ps 58:8). The picture rests on the trail the creature leaves behind it — a smear of slime that looks, to the ancient observer, as though the snail itself were dissolving as it moved. Paired with the still-born child image, it asks that the wicked come to the same end: melting away, never reaching daylight.