What Are Behemoth and Leviathan?

“The Bible implies that Behemoth would be a very large animal of some sort, like a dinosaur, and that Leviathan would be some sort of sea creature, maybe a crocodile. I was wondering if you would be able to help me figure out exactly what kind of animals the Behemoth and the Leviathan are?”

Good question, Eilley!

In Job 40:15–24, God describes Behemoth as a powerful, grass-eating creature with strong loins and a tail “stiff like a cedar” (Job 40:17). We know from this passage that Behemoth was a large land animal (since it ate grass). But its description does not match any modern creatures. Think about today’s largest land animals, like elephants and hippos. They do not have stiff tails. The other large creatures we see today are mostly sea creatures, like whales. For these reasons, some scholars speculate that Behemoth might have been a sauropod dinosaur.

Leviathan, on the other hand, is described as a sea creature. In Job 41, God describes Leviathan as a water-dwelling animal that breathes fire (Job 41:19–21) and has an armored back (Job 41:15) that cannot be pierced by a sword, spear, javelin, or dart (Job 41:26). Some people have thought Leviathan might be a crocodile or an alligator, but this description does not exactly fit. Instead, some scholars think Leviathan could have been a plesiosaur (PLEE-see-uh-sore) or mosasaur (MO-zuh-sore), which are two kinds of extinct marine reptiles.

We don’t know for sure what Behemoth and Leviathan were, but their vivid descriptions in the book of Job help us to know that they were real and that they did live on earth at one point.

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