Record #15
Behemoth
A gigantic primordial beast symbolizing the terrifying power of divine creation.
Original Text
Four centuries before the Christian era, Behemoth was a magnification of the elephant or of the hippopotamus, or a mistaken and alarmist version of these animals; it is now - precisely - the ten famous verses describing it in Job (XL: I;-24) and the huge being which these lines evoke. The rest is wrangling and philology.
The word ‘Behemoth’ is plural; scholars tell us it is the intensive plural form of the Hebrew b’hemah, which means ‘beast’ . As Fray Luis de León wrote in his Exposicióndel Libro de Job: ‘Behemoth is a Hebrew word that stands for “beasts”; according to the received judgement of learned men, it means the elephant, so called because of its inordinate size; and being but a single animal it counts for many.’
We are also reminded of the fact that in the first verse of Genesis in the original text, the Hebrew name for God, Elohím, is plural, though the form of the verb it takes is singular - Bereshit bará Elohím et hashamáim veet haáretz. Trinitarians, by the way, have used this incongruity as an argument for the concept of the godhead being Three-in-One.
We give the ten verses in the translation from the Latin Vulgate by Father Knox (XL: IO-I9):
Here is Behemoth, my creature as thou art, fed on the same grass the oxen eat; yet what strength in his loins, what lustihood in the navel of his belly! Stiff as cedarwood his tail, close-knit the sinews of his groin, bones like pipes of bronze, gristle like plates of steel! None of God’s works can vie with him, no weapon so strong in the hands of its maker; whole mountainsides, the playground of his fellow beasts, he will lay under tribute, as he lies there under the close covert of the marsh-reeds, thick boughs for his shadow, among the willows by the stream. The flooded river he drinks unconcerned; Jordan itself would have no terrors for that gaping mouth. Like a lure it would charm his eye, though it should pierce his nostrils with sharpstakes.
The word ‘Behemoth’ is plural; scholars tell us it is the intensive plural form of the Hebrew b’hemah, which means ‘beast’ . As Fray Luis de León wrote in his Exposicióndel Libro de Job: ‘Behemoth is a Hebrew word that stands for “beasts”; according to the received judgement of learned men, it means the elephant, so called because of its inordinate size; and being but a single animal it counts for many.’
We are also reminded of the fact that in the first verse of Genesis in the original text, the Hebrew name for God, Elohím, is plural, though the form of the verb it takes is singular - Bereshit bará Elohím et hashamáim veet haáretz. Trinitarians, by the way, have used this incongruity as an argument for the concept of the godhead being Three-in-One.
We give the ten verses in the translation from the Latin Vulgate by Father Knox (XL: IO-I9):
Here is Behemoth, my creature as thou art, fed on the same grass the oxen eat; yet what strength in his loins, what lustihood in the navel of his belly! Stiff as cedarwood his tail, close-knit the sinews of his groin, bones like pipes of bronze, gristle like plates of steel! None of God’s works can vie with him, no weapon so strong in the hands of its maker; whole mountainsides, the playground of his fellow beasts, he will lay under tribute, as he lies there under the close covert of the marsh-reeds, thick boughs for his shadow, among the willows by the stream. The flooded river he drinks unconcerned; Jordan itself would have no terrors for that gaping mouth. Like a lure it would charm his eye, though it should pierce his nostrils with sharpstakes.