From the early Church Fathers to now.
1 Patristic · 1 Jewish · 2 Reformed
“For behold I will send among you serpents, basilisks, against which there is no charm: and they shall bite you, saith the Lord.”
“You should know that the disease of envy is harder to cure than any other. I would say that someone tainted by its poison is almost beyond healing. This is the plague described figuratively by the prophet: "See, I will send you serpents against which there are no incantations, and they will bite you." The bites of envy are quite rightly compared by the prophet with the lethal poison of the basilisk.”
“serpents, adders After seventy years, the snake becomes a צפע, which shuts its ear so that it will not hear the voice of the charmer who charms him, as it is stated (Psalms 58:5), “Like a deaf asp that shuts up its ear.” That is the meaning of “that cannot be charmed.””
“When I would comfort myself against terror,.... Either naturally, by eating and drinking, the necessary and lawful means of refreshment; or spiritually, by reading the word of God, and looking over the promises in it: my heart is faint in me; at the consideration of the calamities which were coming upon his people, and which were made known to him by a spirit of prophecy, of which he had no room to doubt. So the Targum takes them to be the words of the prophet, paraphrasing them, "for them, saith the prophet, my heart grieves.''”
“I--Jehovah. cockatrices--basilisks (Isa 11:8), that is, enemies whose destructive power no means, by persuasion or otherwise, can counteract. Serpent-charmers in the East entice serpents by music, and by a particular pressure on the neck render them incapable of darting (Psa 58:4-5).”
The in-app commentary runs from the Fathers to the early-modern record, then stops — that's where the public-domain sources end, not where the reading does. For the modern reading, follow the sources directly.