The author of Job clearly loved lists. Commentators on the book have regularly noted the extensive lists of all types that bedeck the speeches of Job, his friends, and especially God.
For most of the book Job has demanded, increasingly urgently, an audience with God. Job was correct that he had committed no particular sin to cause the disasters that had befallen him; he demanded an answer from God, some explanation for his suffering and vindication of his case.
Yet when God spoke, the focus was on neither Job nor what had occurred in his life. The focus was on God and his sovereign control of all things. Job wanted to ask God questions, but when his audience with God came, it was God asking him questions, rhetorical questions at that.
In chapter 38, God comes in a whirlwind, and after two verses which could hardly be called pleasantries, his questioning begins in verse 4: “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?”
Over the next 34 verses, God lists 43 scenes from nature, and, starting in verse 39, he lists 23 animals for good measure. God’s sovereignty, and therefore his understanding, are more than Job’s – and ours.
As we read through the list of animals, they are impressive: the lion (38:39), the wild donkey (39:5), the wild ox (39:9), the horse (39:19), the hawk 39:26), and, in Job 40:15-24, Behemoth:
Behold, Behemoth,
which I made as I made you;
he eats grass like an ox.
Behold, his strength in his loins,
and his power in the muscles of his belly.
He makes his tail stiff like a cedar;
the sinews of his thighs are knit together.
His bones are tubes of bronze,
his limbs like bars of iron.
He is the first of the works of God;
let him who made him bring near his sword!
For the mountains yield food for him
where all the wild beasts play.
Under the lotus plants he lies,
in the shelter of the reeds and in the marsh.
For his shade the lotus trees cover him;
the willows of the brook surround him.
Behold, if the river is turbulent he is not frightened;
he is confident though Jordan rushes against his mouth.
Can one take him by his eyes,
or pierce his nose with a snare?
What, exactly, is Behemoth?
Readers and interpreters have long struggled to match this description to a known animal, wondering if this instead refers to some type of supernatural or mythical beast.
Most of the descriptions in Job 40 match that of the hippopotamus: a diet of river grass, powerful loins and belly, often living in the marsh or river, never bothered by its rushing current. Even verse 18 makes sense as imagery: bones strong as metal, limbs powerful like iron rods.
The hippo would be a fitting climax to God’s list. It remains one of the most fearsome and dangerous beasts known to man. Weighing between two and four tons, yet clocking in on land at nearly 19 miles per hour, hippos are deadly in water or on land, killing approximately 500 people per year in Africa. They combine a formidable bite, battle-ready tusks, and sheer mass with an aggressive, territorial, and unpredictable temper, attacking without warning.
In short, stay away from the hippo.
And yet, for all the descriptors that match the hippo, we have the beginning of verse 17: “He makes his tail stiff like a cedar.”
A full-grown hippo’s tail is about eight inches long, and it cannot be stiffened. For all its formidable powers, swinging a tail “stiff like a cedar” is not in the hippo’s arsenal. Your dog’s tail would hurt you more than a hippo’s.
Verse 17, therefore, raises the question whether this is a different animal, possibly extinct. Some have gone as far as to suggest that Job 40 indicates humans once coexisted with dinosaurs. The requisite scientific timeline does not work, nor does this biblical description match any dinosaur fossil known. Instead, the Bible is pointing in a different direction.
Job 40 starts with the image of the hippo, recognizable enough to an ancient or modern audience, but it then builds from there to a mythical idea, not a dinosaur or extinct creature, but a creature to boggle the imagination: imagine a hippo… but worse.
With the hippo and leviathan (which will follow in chapter 41), the Bible is moving to an image of the most fearsome imaginable creatures, both on land and in water. God says to Job, “Imagine the worst animal you can think of. Now go further.”
Even more, God is bridging from the natural world to the theological world. Verse 19 begins, “He is the first of the works of God.” “First” (Hebrew rēshîth) would take any Jewish reader immediately back to the very beginning of the Bible, as Genesis 1:1 begins “in the beginning” (berēshîth). In the beginning was chaos, represented by the primordial sea, a place inhospitable to life, a flooding, chaotic maelstrom. Behemoth hints at the forces of chaos that destroy and drown out life, forces Job has now experienced personally.
Yet, it is likely God intends a double meaning, as rēshîth can be not just temporally first but also rhetorically first: the strongest, the most powerful, the best. Take note, it is God, not Job, referencing the Behemoth. Nowhere are we told that Job himself had ever seen a Behemoth, though he may have had descriptions of what a Behemoth looked like from legendary tales circulating at the time. The goal is not for the reader to pick between a natural and a mythical animal, but to bridge from one to the other. God is in control of all things, even those things that have happened to Job.
Beginning with his speeches in chapter 38, God emphasizes to Job his role as creator and from that his power and sovereign control. In this, Job should not only be awed by Behemoth, but he should also see a connection: “Behemoth, which I made as I made you” (40:15). God’s point is that any animal that had ever existed, whether a thing he had seen or simply heard about – even Behemoth, should such a creature exist – would still be God’s creation, meaning God sovereignly created and providentially ruled over him.
Why does Job need to see this? Behemoth may be the most powerful imaginable land animal, even a representation of primordial chaos, yet Behemoth only does what God made him to do. Behemoth, for all his strength, does not rage against God. He is merely a creature, and even the most powerful creature, even a mythical one, knows its maker. God is in control of every creature on his list.
Mankind, set above all the animals (Genesis 1:26, 28) is fearfully and wonderfully made, only “a little lower than the heavenly beings” (Psalm 8:5). Mankind is the pinnacle of God’s entire list of created animals. Given this, one would expect God’s list to end with mankind, yet it does not. It ends with Behemoth and then (to come next) Leviathan.
As a man, Job needs to brace himself and learn from those animals. Behemoth, for all his power, knows that God is God and that he is a created creature. Even when the waters are in his mouth, up to his nostrils, he still breathes and knows his God. God wants Job to do the same. And us.
Dr. William Fullilove is the Professor of Old Testament and Dean of Students at Reformed Theological Seminary, New York City and also the executive pastor at McLean Presbyterian Church in McLean, Virginia.