My answer here was that when I set up the Static IP address on the Raspberry Pi itself, I also provided a gateway, subnet mask, and desired DNS server. The DNS server I set to the Raspberry Pi's IP within my network, e.g. 192.168.0.44. What it needed to be set to was localhost, e.g. specifically 127.0.0.1. I believe the flood of DNS queries was this error causing a loop.