Tool Beta
The Gods of the Bible
Every named divine being in Scripture, what the text calls it, and what the ancient world thought it was.
Behemoth
A huge land beast in Job that nobody has been able to identify.
Job 40:15-24, in every translation this tool compares.
A huge land animal in Job that nobody has pinned down. Hippo, elephant and mythical bull have all been argued, and every one of them strains some line of the description. The Hebrew is a plural form doing singular duty, which does not help.
A plural form used as a singular, which is part of why the identification is hard. Hippopotamus, elephant, and mythic bull have all been proposed, and each one strains some part of the description.
H930, 1 occ
Marvin Pope's proposed Ugaritic ancestor is "El's calf Atik," also called Arshu, paired in the Baal Cycle with a seven-headed sea dragon and defeated by Anat in the same boast: "I smote Ar[shu] beloved of El, I put an end to El's calf Atik" (KTU 1.3 iii:43-44), right after she claims the dragon. The pairing follows Job 40-41's own order, an ox-like land beast beside a sea monster. Egypt had a ritual answer that suits the hippopotamus reading, a festival where a hippo was killed ceremonially as a stand-in for pharaoh's enemies, on top of the animal's usual role in Egyptian myth as a hostile power against the throne. Later Jewish tradition (1 Enoch 60:7-9) makes the pair explicit and geographic, Behemoth male and in the desert east of Eden, Leviathan female and in the abyss, both fattened for the righteous at the end-time banquet (also 2 Baruch 29:4; 4 Ezra 6:49-52).
The identification. Hippopotamus, elephant and a mythic bull have all been argued. Pope's Ugaritic candidate, El's calf Atik, comes paired with a sea dragon in the same order as Job 40-41. The hippopotamus has an Egyptian ritual in its favor and the description of the genitals against it, and Driver's crocodile needs an emended text. The word works as a proper name nowhere else in the Old Testament.
The sauropod reading, which needs the tail like a cedar to be a neck and ignores the rest of the passage. The hippopotamus reading has its own problem, since the text stresses Behemoth's visible genitals and a hippo's are internal and mostly underwater. Grammatically behemoth is the intensive feminine plural of "beast," yet every verb and pronoun for it in Job 40 is masculine singular, a plural-form name for a singular, mythic super-ox, and nowhere else in the Old Testament does the word work as a proper name. G. R. Driver's rival crocodile reading has to emend the Masoretic Text to get there, swapping which word eats which ("he eats cattle like grass" for "he eats grass like cattle").
- Job 40:15-24
- B. F. Batto, "Behemoth," DDD, 165
- Duane A. Garrett, *Job*, EEC, 533-534, 541
- Matthews/Chavalas/Walton, *IVP Bible Background Commentary: OT*, on Job 40:15-24
