Toon Theology

What was Behemoth?

Curiosities · Job 40:15

Short answer

The land-beast God shows Job just before Leviathan, the sea-beast. Its name is simply the Hebrew word for "beast" in a form that means something like "the beast of beasts". A hippopotamus is the most popular identification, but the poem is less interested in which animal it is than in the fact that only God can master it.

01

What the text actually says

One passage, ten verses (Job 40:15–24), in God's second speech to Job.

Behold now behemoth, which I made with thee; he eateth grass as an ox.Job 40:15 — made alongside Job, and a grass-eater
He moveth his tail like a cedar: the sinews of his stones are wrapped together.Job 40:17 — the verse every identification has to explain
He is the chief of the ways of God: he that made him can make his sword to approach unto him.Job 40:19 — the first of God's works, and only its Maker can approach it
Behold, he drinketh up a river, and hasteth not: he trusteth that he can draw up Jordan into his mouth.Job 40:23 — unhurried by a flood

The point of the speech is not natural history. Job has demanded that God answer him, and God answers by showing him two creatures Job cannot control. If Job cannot master what God made, he is in no position to sit in judgment on how God runs the world.

Behemoth is paired with Leviathan, which follows straight after (Job 41). One rules the land and one the sea, so between them they stand for everything wild and untameable in creation.

02

What we actually know

Graded by how sure it is possible to be.

  • Attestedבְּהֵמוֹת (behemot) is the plural of בְּהֵמָה (behemah), the ordinary word for a beast or for cattle. Used of a single creature that takes a singular verb, the plural is best read as intensive: the beast par excellence.
  • AttestedAs the name of a particular creature it occurs only in Job 40:15. Elsewhere the same form just means "beasts" (for example Psalm 50:10, "the cattle upon a thousand hills").
  • AttestedLater Jewish writings turn the pair into two great monsters of the end: Behemoth on land and Leviathan in the sea, kept to be food for the righteous (1 Enoch 60:7–9; 4 Ezra 6:49–52; 2 Baruch 29:4).
  • ProbableThe description is built on a real large animal. Eating grass, lying among reeds and marsh (40:21) and staying calm in a flooding river all fit the hippopotamus well, an identification argued since Samuel Bochart in 1663.
  • DisputedWhether the "tail like a cedar" (40:17) rules the hippopotamus out. Its tail is short. Many scholars read "tail" here as a euphemism, which the second half of the verse, about the sinews of its "stones", supports; others take it at face value and suggest the elephant's trunk or a creature that never existed.
  • SpeculativeThat the poet had a single species in mind at all, rather than heightening a real animal into something more than real, as the same speech plainly does with Leviathan breathing fire.
  • Popular mythThat Behemoth is a sauropod dinosaur. The case rests on the cedar-like tail and needs humans and non-avian dinosaurs to have lived together, which nothing in the fossil record supports.
03

What people get wrong

The common mistake is to treat the passage as a field guide and to stake everything on getting the species right. The writer is using the most powerful animals his readers knew, heightened by poetry, to say one thing: you did not make this, and you cannot tame it.

The opposite mistake is to call Behemoth pure myth. The text says plainly that God made it "with thee", alongside Job, as a creature. Whatever it is, it is something God made, not a rival god.

Still open

The "tail like a cedar" is still the live question. Is it a euphemism, a poet's exaggeration of a real animal, or a sign that Behemoth was always meant to be more than any one animal?

Sources

  1. Job 40:15–24 and 41, in the Hebrew text and the KJV.
  2. 1 Enoch 60:7–9; 4 Ezra 6:49–52; 2 Baruch 29:4, on the two monsters in later Jewish tradition.
  3. Samuel Bochart, Hierozoicon (1663), the classic argument for the hippopotamus.
  4. David J. A. Clines, Job 38–42, Word Biblical Commentary 18B (Thomas Nelson, 2011).
  5. John E. Hartley, The Book of Job, NICOT (Eerdmans, 1988).

Read next