Were there Dinosaurs in the Bible?

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Is it possible that all the accounts of fabulous critters resulted from Bronze and Stone Age folk finding such remains and then trying to imagine just what the critter looked like?

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I don't think so. The Behemoth is described as hiding in reeds, drinking water, and lying under locust trees. To me, this sounds like an animal that a lot of people had observed in the wild, not as a fossil.As a counterexample, the dragons of asian folklore probably were inspired by fossils. Dragons often have spiritual powers and drawings of asian dragons do not resemble any dinosaur that ever lived but do resemble fossils somewhat. I happened to watch an episode of "Globe Trekker" on PBS where one of the travellers went across the Gobi dessert in Mongolia. His guide showed him many dinosaur bones that are buried only inches from the surface. The whole plain is supposedly littered with dinosaur bones. In this case it seems very plausible that dragons have their roots in fossil finds.

sure, but i don't think he's talking about anything even remotely mythological, at least until we get to leviathan.the lord talks about lions (38:39-41), mountain goats (39:1-4), wild asses (39:5-8), wild oxen (39:9-12), ostriches (39:13-18), horses (39:19-25), hawks (39:26-30), and then (as is the pattern in job) everything starts over. god restarts his speach, and refers to only two animals: behemoth and leviathan.now, it would make sense for them to both be mythological. but i don't think they are, exactly. i think job thought them both to be very real.to me, behemoth sounds like a rogue elephant, which job probably would never have seen, and leviathan a sea serpent of some kind. both have a somewhat mythological status, but one is definitaly similar to a real animal.

I think he is and he isn't.I've struggled with Leviathan for a very long time. This name is Lotan in the Ugaritic literature. But in Gen 1 and in the Babylonian creation we deal with the same creature under the name (Heb)tehom/(Akk)Tiamat (the deep, the dangerous waters) and she is the chaos dragon. Isa 27:1, an incredibly close parallel to a piece from Ugarit, is clearly the chaos dragon, though here called Leviathan. The Job passage is not the only one which links Leviathan and Behemoth: see also 2 Esdras 6:49 and 2 Baruch 29:4-5 (in an apocalyptic context) -

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And Behemoth shall be revealed from his place and Leviathan shall ascend from the sea, those two great monsters which I created on the fifth day of creation, and shall have kept until that time; and then they shall 5 be for food for all that are left.

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and 1 Enoch 60:7-8

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7 And on that day were two monsters parted, a female monster named Leviathan, to dwell in the 8 abysses of the ocean over the fountains of the waters. But the male is named Behemoth, who occupied with his breast a waste wilderness named Duidain, on the east of the garden where the elect and righteous dwell

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Isaiah 30:6 is also a probable mention of Behemoth calling it Behemoth of the desert, which most translators see as beasts BHMT of the Negev (=south, =desert) and in the following verse we get a mention of tehom in its guise of Rahab (just another name for the chaotic water dragon).These two creatures are bound together in citations. Behemoth is found in the desert and Leviathan in the deep. If you need the background work on Leviathan/tehom, I suppose I can dig it up, but the Babylonian Tiamat preserves the feminine Semitic ending (the /t/) while it's lost in tehom (Hebrew generally lost it), though it is preserved in Behemoth (which in form might be confused with the plural of "beast" [i]BHM[/b].We have THM from the chaotic deep and BHM from the empty desert. Now the words in Gen 1:2 for "chaos" (ie without form) and "empty" are THW and BHW. Tehom/Leviathan and Behemoth are clearly and originally derived from THW W-BHW and thus by necessity born from myth. But it is not strange in the very physical language of Hebrew, that these creatures take on more physical characteristics, so that they will have the literary appearance of real animals.

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I wouldn't resent your verbal usurpation so much if it were for a more valid objection, but in this case, I do.

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If you can adequately explain to me another animal that might fit that description, I will recant my position that it is referring to a large dinosaur.

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Amplified Bible identifies "Behemoth" as a hippo.This message has been edited by southerngurl, 12-08-2004 08:46 PM

first lesson in bible study: beware footnotes, bible dictionaries, and concordances, and learn to pick out the baseless dogmatic assumptions from them.behemoth, as described by the text, is clearly a land animal. this makes sense as a parallel to leviathan, a sea serpent.

i've read a bit on this, but not much. leviathan was the water elemental dragon, and el (god) the air elemental god (sometime represented as a bull?). the ugaritic creation story is something along the lines of el forming order out of the waters of chaos, by conquering the dragon that was in them. hints of this can indeed be seen in genesis 1 (the dragons) and psalm 74. it does line up very nicely, but i think you're drawing a few too many parallels. and it's tanniyn, not tehom. tanniyn simply means snake. the reason i say dragons for the gen 1 verse is not the word snake, but word that modifies it. it says "GREAT serpents" ie: dragons.this word is the same word used do describe what moses's staff turns into. clearly the word alone does not imply leviathan, but may be a way of describing it. i think you have a very good point here, they do seem to be linked, commonly grouped together. in fact, parallelism is common structure for poetry, and in enoch, behemoth is the parallel for leviathan.good evidence for them both being mythological. this point is wrong on several points.it says behemah here, or "beasts." but the words are obviously very similiar. i don't see much reason to think it refers to behemoth at all. especially since that line is actually an addition, after the initial writing of the text. in my version, it's set of from the verse (like poetic verse, not bible verse), and says "the 'beasts of the negev' pronouncement." it's a chapter heading, basically.also, the serpents here are NOT leviathan, they are something else: seraphim. they are the serpents that aflict the israelites in the book of numbers, and make everyone sick. the kind of serpent used along with seraphim is nachash, the sort of seprent in genesis 3. they also fly, not dwell in water.i'm not entirely sure what is up with the seraphim, but i'm very curious. if you have any info on those, it would be much appreciated. well, yes, but that's not exactly what i'm talking about. i think that although both were likely mythological, they were not strictly so. rather, the images used were probably drawn from real animals.behemoth i think fits as a rogue elephant or a bull of some kind.not sure on leviathan. ugaritic legend, if i recall, indicates multiple (7?) heads. this would make it very similar to something like scylla (from the odyssey).

I still think that there is a good chance that all of these critters are based on fossil evidence. If you have ever been fortunate enough to have been at a dig where fossil skeletons were formed, one of the most striking things is the often bizarre arrangement of the bones. They are found in positions impossible to achieve in life, and often pieces are seperated, rearranged and scattered over an area.It's far more common to find a single bone or just a few bones than a whole skeleton. In fact, locating an intact skeleton is relatively rare.I believe that the most likely explaination of the mythical figures and of giants is that folk found bones, often later mammalian ones such a mammoths. These were obviously once the bones of some living creature. But what?When you find a three foot long femur, what did it come from? Take a look at this fairly recent find from Florida.It's not hard to imagine, based on a find such as that, a giant. Similar finds could easily lead to things such as Behemoth.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

Tehom is the deep in Gen 1:2, but let us look more closely.Firstly we have the obvious linguistic connection with Tiamat: they are cognates. Tiamat was the chaos dragon which Marduk slayed. Note in Genesis 1:2 that the divine wind was on the face of the waters. In the Babylonian version this wind was the Umhullu wind which Marduk used to slay Tiamat, the wind forcing Tiamat's mouth open and Marduk was able to force his sword in. The battle is not enunciated in Gen 1, but the elements are there. Then, once Tiamat was killed, Marduk slit her in half and lifted half up to the heavens and out of the other half he created the world. Tehom's role in Gen 1 has totally been sublimated. So, I'm happy that I am principally dealing with tehom. The serpent tannym is merely another name.Isaiah 30:6 - The text I have definitely says BHMWT. Check it out here.I said that in the following verse, ie 30:7, we get a reference to Rahab, which is another name used for out chaos dragon. See Ps 89:9ff. God "rules the raging of the sea" we are told followed by the fact that he "crushed Rahab like a carcass". Isaiah 51:9 has the parallelism, "didn't you cut Rahab to pieces, pierce the dragon" immediately followed by "Was it not you who dried up the sea?" Rahab is simply another label for our sea monster/watery chaos dragon and in Isaiah 30:7 we get her mentioned in a verse straight after the mention of Behemoth. This is not coincidental.But let us not get hung up about Isa 30:6-7, as it doesn't further the basic thesis I put forward. It was just another example of the two creatures appearing together in the same passage. I thought that that was what I was saying. Wasn't it?What I need to understand is the alternation between the Mesopotamian Tiamat, the Ugaritic Lotan, the Hebrew tehom in Gen 1 and the use of Leviathan elsewhere.Isaiah 27:1 is an extremely close parallel to a Ugaritic text, so close that I would normally suspect literary borrowing, but how can one connect a text whose latest date is about 1170 BCE (from a civilization which simply folded up shop with its destruction at the hands of the Sea Peoples) and another of perhaps seven hundred years later. It may simply have been a piece of recited poetry which survived all that time.My guess with the tehom story, ie the undertext of Gen 1, is that it was written either during or after the exile under the influence of the Babylonian creation story and then later filtered through the centralising effect of the one god theology.This would mean that the two strands may be originally the one story which took two separate routes into the Jewish tradition.To complicate things further I get the impression that Leviathan is sometimes used as a symbol of Egypt, which would suggest that Behemoth is a symbol for the other great power in Mesopotamia.

oh, ok. i misread.your saying the deep is associated with dragons, ala tiamat. i would agree, sure. you've shown lots of support for that, and i've seen some of it before, so it's not exactly a suprise. i was just arguing the technicalities of the words. so it does. intersting.the two (behemah and behemoth) are definitally related words. you bring very interesting points. i guess we don't disagree then. i would have to agree. really? do expound on this. that's very intriguing. i've never seen it read that way before, but it does make sense when i think about it.

sure. i'm guessing something like a rhino or elephant or the like for behemoth. maybe a mammoth? (that would be rather funny, actually)but what for leviathan? pleisiosaurs? giant squid?

I agree. Something living had to have captivated the author.But it is true that the fossils of extinct pre-historic mammals have given rise to various spactacular legends.The Greeks, Native Americans etc. most likely found these bones and came up with myths to try and explain them.The Behemoth and Leviathan described by Job seem to be the Hippo, and Crocodile.

once living. or rumored to be alive. no. no. no. no.behemoth is characterized as a LAND ANIMAL, representing desert. leviathan is characterized as a SEA ANIMAL, representing deep primordial oceans.both the croc and the hippo are aquatic land animals, and thus NEITHER fits the description. behemoth and leviathan are two extreme, and those two are somewhere in the middle. please pay more attention to the thread.

I don't think there are any recorded instances of Giant Squid strandings in the Med. My guess is that Leviathan is classic Fish Tale, ie: just made up.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

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I don't think there are any recorded instances of Giant Squid strandings in the Med.

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I was under the impression that squid were quite prolific in the med, and figuire prominently in Mycenean imagery. In fact I even recall hearing that there was a famous sea monster in the bosphorus from classical times thought to be a giant squid.Giant squid - or at least squid as large as those found in the pacific, sobigger than humans - might have been found in the med in pre-classical times.This message has been edited by contracycle, 12-10-2004 11:04 AM

Could be. I just don't know of any confirmed sightings of Giant Squid.The smaller varieties are certainly there, ie: calimari.question?What should be served after a Bris?Answer from Martha Stewart:Why Calimari rings in a tomato bisque.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion