Did You Know 02: Dinosaurs in the Bible

Could dinosaurs have walked through the pages of Scripture? One strange verse in Job has kept that question alive for centuries.

Did you know? 🤔 The Bible mentions a mysterious creature called “Behemoth” in the book of Job (Job 40:15-24), which some scholars believe could be a reference to dinosaurs or other large prehistoric animals.

Tucked into one of the oldest books in the Bible is a creature that sounds like it belongs somewhere else entirely — in a natural history museum, not a book of Scripture.

Behemoth appears in Job 40, near the end of God’s long response to Job out of the storm. God has just finished walking Job through the wonders of creation — the stars, the sea, the wild animals of the earth — and then He turns to this one creature as though saving the most astonishing example for last. “Look at Behemoth,” He says, “which I made along with you” (Job 40:15). The description that follows is startling: “What strength it has in its loins, what power in the muscles of its belly! Its tail sways like a cedar” (Job 40:16-17). A tail like a cedar tree is not a small detail — cedars were among the largest trees known in the ancient world. Whatever this animal was, its sheer scale was the point.

Scholars have long debated exactly what Behemoth was. The traditional guess has been the hippopotamus or the elephant, both of which fit parts of the description — the vegetarian diet, the powerful build, the riverside habitat. But others have pointed out that the picture in Job doesn’t quite settle for either. The cedar-like tail is hard to square with a hippo’s short tail, and the language throughout has a grandeur that seems to reach for something larger than anything walking the earth in Job’s own day. That’s led some readers, over the centuries, to wonder whether the writer was describing something closer to what we’d now call a dinosaur or another large prehistoric creature — a beast whose kind had vanished by the time later generations tried to name it.

We can’t say with certainty which it was, and the text itself isn’t trying to settle a zoology question. Its point is bigger than the animal. God is asking Job — a man in the middle of unbearable suffering, demanding answers — to consider a creature so immense, so far beyond Job’s own strength and understanding, that it humbles him simply to look at it. If Job cannot even fully explain or master Behemoth, how much less can he stand in judgment over the One who made it?

Whatever Behemoth turns out to have been, it still does exactly the job it was written to do: it reminds us how small our full understanding really is next to the God who made every strange and mighty thing on the earth, seen and unseen, named and still unnamed.