All Aboard the Scholarship

In the past six years I've probably heard about or studied about every fallacy and false claim regarding the bible and academia (going through bible college and then leading a college ministry), especially since most fraudulent views and beliefs are recycled from various 1st century heresies, and nothing is new under the sun. There's a number of people I have heard teach and preach and have drawn from to put together my worldview and understanding of the "big picture" of scripture, and how the bible itself "fits together". A popular and appropriate word for these people is scholars. I consider myself an aspiring scholar. Very transitional :)

But every once in a while, you read something in the Bible that is problematic, or requires exploration, and the scholarly beliefs are pretty unsatisfactory, or downright ridiculous. In my latest Old Testament class studying Job, I came across one such example that has little significance, but is still interesting to me.

In Job 40-41, God describes two of his greatest creatures: Behemoth and Leviathan. Now, don't get me wrong, this is a poem, so it's possible that these are overwhelming examples of hyperbole, but the "scholarly" tradition states that these creatures described correspond to a hippopotamus and an alligator. That sounds absolutely ridiculous to me.

Behemoth is described as eating grass. So far so good. It also describes his strength as being in his loins, or abdomen, and the muscles of his belly, and the manner in which he "bends his tail like a cedar." That is NOT a hippopotamus. Hippos have whispy little tails like eeyore, and their strength is in their jaws. Even if you were embellishing how mighty a hippo is, you'd talk about how fast it is, and how sharp it's teeth are, not it's tail.

The rest talks about how Behemoth is comfortable in just about any climate, again not a hippo. Hippos need water, and are intensly territorial around bodies of water. Sorry folks, I've been 10 feet from a Hippo in a game reserve, but I've never dreamed of a Behemoth. Sounds a bit like those creatures the orcs are riding in Return of the King in the big battle scene.

Leviathan is an even more impressive description, and couldn't possibly be an alligator, not for all the tea in china. It describes the Leviathan's skin as an "outer armor" of "double mail", and the seals which cannot be broken. It also describes it's breath as flashing fire and billowing smoky coals. Some writers envision an alligator spewing forth mist from underwater like a whale's blowhole and the poet interpreting that as smoke. It's a poem, so I guess you can read it that way, but it sounds to me exactly like Smogg from The Hobbit. You can kill an alligator with a hunting knife if she doesn't get you first, but the sword or spear does not avail against Leviathan.

I've never seen anything like what the bible describes, but it doesn't describe anything like what scholars claim, and it seems really weird that they stand by those interpretations. I don't think it's significant at all, but if I can get comfortable enough with Hebrew, I think this would make a fun topic for my ThM thesis in a few years, mostly because of it's lack of significance, and just the thought of writing my graduate thesis on "dragons in the bible". lol.