Creation & Origins
What About the Dinosaurs?
Behemoth, Leviathan, and what the Bible actually says about giant creatures
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Creation & Origins
Behemoth, Leviathan, and what the Bible actually says about giant creatures
Creation & Origins
6,000 years? 4.5 billion? The answer depends on how you read Genesis — and serious Christians land on both sides.
Read answerCreation & Origins
The Bible mentions giants multiple times — Nephilim, Anakim, Rephaim, and Goliath. Whether they were literal giants or powerful warriors is debated, but the texts treat them as real.
Read answerCreation & Origins
The Bible mentions sea monsters, Leviathan, and tannin (translated 'dragon' or 'sea creature') over 20 times. Whether these are dinosaurs, mythological symbols, or real creatures is debated.
So did the Bible just quietly skip over dinosaurs? Not exactly.
Here's something most people don't realize: God Himself describes two creatures in the book of Job that don't neatly match any animal alive today. We're talking about Behemoth and Leviathan — and the descriptions are extraordinary. Not just "large animal" extraordinary. We're talking bones like bronze, fire literally pouring from its mouth, and a tail compared to a cedar tree. These aren't passing details, either. God brings them up during the most powerful moment in all of Scripture — the moment where He finally answers Job out of the whirlwind and essentially says, "Let me show you what you're dealing with."
Chapters 40 and 41 of Job are God's closing argument, and He chose these two creatures as His final exhibit. That alone should tell you they matter. Whatever Behemoth and Leviathan are, God considered them important enough to use as evidence of His unmatched power. So let's take a careful look at what He said.
📖 Job 40:15-24 God tells Job to look at Behemoth — a creature He made "along with you." Right away, that's significant. This isn't some abstract concept. God describes a real, physical being:
It eats grass like an ox. Its strength is in its hips, its power in its stomach muscles. It bends its tail like a cedar. The sinews of its thighs are tightly knit. Its bones are like beams of bronze, its ribs like bars of iron. It is the first of the works of God.
Now here's where it gets interesting. For centuries, many commentators have said Behemoth is simply a hippopotamus or an elephant. And hippos are certainly large and dangerous — nobody's disputing that. But read that description again. "Its tail like a cedar." Have you seen a hippo's tail? It's a small, flat appendage. Nobody would compare it to a cedar tree.
There are three main scholarly views on what Behemoth actually is:
The naturalist view says it's a hippo or an elephant. These were the largest land animals ancient Near Eastern people would have known, and the poetic language is just hyperbole. This is the most common view in mainstream commentaries.
The dinosaur view says the description fits a sauropod — one of those massive long-necked dinosaurs — better than any living animal. The cedar tail, the bronze bones, the sheer scale of the thing. Proponents argue that if Job lived in the early ancient world, overlap with late-surviving dinosaurs isn't impossible in their framework.
The mythological view says Behemoth is a cosmic chaos creature — a symbolic beast representing untamed creation that only God can control. Ancient Near Eastern literature is full of these figures, and Job's poetry may be drawing on that tradition to make a theological point rather than a zoological one.
Honestly? All three views have serious scholars behind them. The text doesn't give us a species label. What it does give us is a creature so massive and powerful that only God could handle it — and that's the point God is making to Job.
📖 Job 41:1-34 If Behemoth was impressive, Leviathan is on an entirely different level. God spends a full chapter — 34 verses — describing this creature, and the description is genuinely terrifying:
Its sneezings flash forth light. Out of its mouth go burning torches; sparks of fire leap out. Smoke pours from its nostrils like a boiling pot. Its breath kindles coals, and a flame comes from its mouth. Strength dwells in its neck, and terror dances before it.
Fire. From its mouth. Smoke from its nostrils. Scales so tight that no air can get between them. Weapons bounce off it like straw. It leaves a glowing wake in the water. And then God says this:
It looks down on all that are haughty; it is king over all the sons of pride.
Many people say Leviathan is a crocodile. And crocodiles are genuinely fearsome. But crocodiles don't breathe fire. They don't have impenetrable armor that makes swords and spears completely useless. The description goes far beyond any reptile we know.
Leviathan also appears in Isaiah 27:1, where it's called "the fleeing serpent, the twisting serpent" — and God promises to slay it. In that context, Leviathan represents chaos, evil, and the forces that oppose God. Some scholars see Job 41's Leviathan as the same symbolic figure: not a literal animal but an embodiment of everything untamable in creation that God alone has authority over.
Others argue the vivid physical details — the scales, the fire, the underwater movement — point to a real creature, possibly something that went extinct. Maybe something we'd now call a dinosaur or a marine reptile. The bombardier beetle already proves that biological fire-production mechanisms exist in nature, so the concept isn't as far-fetched as it sounds.
Either way, the theological weight is the same: whatever this creature is, you can't handle it. God can. That's the point.
📖 Genesis 1:21 This one is brief but important. On Day Five of creation, Genesis says:
So God created the great sea creatures — the tanninim — and every living thing that moves in the waters.
The Hebrew word tanninim gets translated different ways: "great sea creatures," "great whales," "sea monsters." It's the same root word used elsewhere for serpentine, dragon-like creatures. Genesis doesn't elaborate. It simply states that God made massive, powerful creatures of the deep.
No apology. No explanation. God made them. That's it. Whatever giant creatures have existed — past or present — they fall under that creative act. The Bible doesn't skip over large animals. It just doesn't focus on categorizing them the way we tend to.
This is where the dinosaur conversation always leads, so let's address it directly.
Young earth creationists believe the earth is roughly 6,000–10,000 years old. In this view, dinosaurs were created on Day Six alongside humans, coexisted with people for a time, and most were wiped out in Noah's flood. Behemoth and Leviathan could be surviving species that Job actually encountered. This view takes the Genesis genealogies as literal chronology and reads the creation days as 24-hour periods.
Old earth creationists believe the earth is around 4.5 billion years old. In this view, dinosaurs lived and went extinct roughly 66 million years before humans appeared. The "days" in Genesis represent long epochs, or the creation account is structured theologically rather than chronologically. Behemoth and Leviathan are either poetic and mythological or describe creatures Job's audience would have recognized.
Here's what matters: both views are held by serious, Bible-believing Christians who love Jesus and take Scripture as authoritative. This isn't a salvation issue. It's an interpretation issue — specifically about literary genre. The Bible is not a science textbook. It's a theology textbook. It tells you who created and why, not necessarily how long ago or in what precise sequence according to modern scientific categories.
Thoughtful people land on different sides of this. That's perfectly fine. What's not fine is treating the other side as foolish.
Here's the deeper reality — the dinosaur question is almost never truly about dinosaurs. It's about trust.
The real question underneath is: Can I trust a book that doesn't answer every question I have? And that's a fair thing to wrestle with. But consider what you're actually asking. The Bible was written to reveal who God is, what's wrong with the world, and how He's fixing it through Jesus. It's a rescue story, not an encyclopedia.
You don't read a love letter and then criticize it for not mentioning your tax return. You don't watch a movie about redemption and rate it poorly because it didn't explain how the car engine works. Genre matters. The Bible tells you everything you need to know about God, humanity, sin, and salvation. It does not promise to be a comprehensive field guide to paleontology.
The silence on T-Rex isn't a gap in the Bible's credibility. It's evidence that the Bible has a different purpose than the one you're testing it against. And honestly, the fact that it describes creatures in Job that still have scholars debating thousands of years later is remarkable. The text is richer and more complex than people often give it credit for.
God made everything. The land animals, the sea creatures, the tanninim, Behemoth, Leviathan — all of it. He describes creatures in Job that resist easy categorization, and He does it to make a point: You are not the biggest thing in the room. I am.
Whether those creatures were literal dinosaurs, symbolic representations of chaos, or something we don't yet have a category for — the theological point doesn't change. The Creator is bigger than creation. Every massive, terrifying, awe-inspiring thing that has ever existed is just a footnote on His resume.
So the next time someone asks, "What about the dinosaurs?" — the honest answer is this: the Bible describes some truly extraordinary creatures, scholars have been debating what they are for centuries, and the God who made them is the same God who knows your name. That's not a deflection. That's the whole point.