Behemoth

Behemoth appears substantially in one passage, the divine speeches of Job (40:15-24), where it is a huge grazing land animal with bones like bronze and a tail it stiffens "like a cedar," shown to Job as something he did not make and cannot master. The name is the Hebrew behemah, "beast," in an intensive plural form, roughly "the beast of beasts," the animal par excellence.

Ancient and modern readers have tried to identify it with a real creature, usually the hippopotamus or, less plausibly, the elephant, and the description fits a great riverine herbivore well enough; but the point in Job is theological rather than zoological, one of a series of creatures whose wildness lies outside human control and inside God's. In later Jewish tradition Behemoth is paired with Leviathan as the land to the other's sea, the two, with Ziz for the air, forming a triad of primordial monsters reserved for the feast of the righteous at the end of time.

Behemoth appears in a speech, not in a story. God is answering Job out of the whirlwind and the answer is a catalogue of creatures Job did not make and cannot control. Behemoth comes first and Leviathan follows, and the two are the climax of the argument: look at what is in the world, and consider whether you are in a position to audit its governance.

The description in the fortieth chapter of Job is physically specific. The creature eats grass like an ox, its strength is in its loins, it lies under the lotus in the marsh, and it is unmoved when the river rushes. Commentators reading for natural history identify it with the hippopotamus, and the marsh, the river and the grazing all fit. Commentators reading for myth point to the closing lines, which set the creature beyond human capture, and to the pairing with Leviathan, which is not an animal in any ordinary sense.

Both readings are old and neither excludes the other. Hebrew poetry can describe a real animal in terms borrowed from a mythological one, and the rhetorical force of the passage depends on the creature being both familiar and beyond reach. Later Jewish tradition took the second reading and made Behemoth the land counterpart in a scheme of three, which is where most later use of the name begins.