Behemoth

On the day the land was lifted out of the water and given grass, something enormous was set down on it to eat. It moves through the marsh without hurry, half hidden in reed and shade, its belly low among the lotus plants and the willows of the bank. When it lowers its head to the river the water level drops. The oldest description says it can take the whole Jordan into its mouth and not flinch, certain the river will never be enough to fill it.

That description comes from the end of the book of Job, from the speech God delivers out of a whirlwind to a man who has spent the whole book demanding answers. The reply is not comfort. It is a tour of creation’s most overwhelming animals, and Behemoth is the first of them. It eats grass like an ox, but there the likeness to cattle stops. Its strength sits in its loins and its force in the muscles of its belly. Its bones are tubes of bronze, its limbs bars of iron. Its tail it stiffens like a cedar, a line that has unsettled readers for centuries, because no grazing animal anyone has ever met carries a tail like a tree.

For a long time the favored explanation was the hippopotamus. The setting fits: the river, the reeds, the great submerged bulk in the shade. Even the Hebrew name seems to point that way, since some trace it to an Egyptian phrase for the water-ox. Yet the word as it sits in Hebrew is stranger than any single animal. Behemoth is the plural of the ordinary word for beast, and the plural works here as an intensifier, the way the language sometimes piles a noun on itself to mean the thing at its highest pitch. It is not a herd. It is beast-ness itself, the animal beyond all animals, and the cedar tail belongs to that reading far more comfortably than to anything in a river.

Later tradition took the hint and ran. In the writings that grew up around the Hebrew Bible, Behemoth becomes one of a pair. Early in creation God made two monsters too vast for the world to bear in numbers, so he made only one of each. Leviathan he gave the sea. Behemoth he gave the dry land. The Book of Enoch sets it in an invisible waste east of the garden, a desert called Dendain, while a later apocalypse hands it a thousand mountains for pasture, every one of them grazed bare in a single day. The grass grows back each night. Nothing it does diminishes the ground it was given.

There was meant to be a mate. As with Leviathan, the rabbis spoke of a male and female Behemoth and feared what would follow if the two were ever allowed to breed. The world could not have held their young. So God kept them apart, barren and solitary, and the danger was sealed off. The great land-beast grazes alone on its mountains and drinks from one river. The stories disagree on the finer points, but they agree on the fear underneath them. Two of these would have been the end of everything.

All of it is a holding pattern. Behemoth and Leviathan are being kept, like livestock fattened toward a date already fixed. At the end of days, when the righteous are gathered in, the two will be led out to fight. Leviathan will tear at Behemoth with its fins and Behemoth will gore Leviathan with its horns, and in the slaughter both will fall. Then the meat is served. The pious eat the beast of the land and the beast of the sea at one table, seated beneath canopies cut from Leviathan’s hide, and the long restraint of creation is spent at last in a single meal.

Back in Job none of that future is on the table. There the beast exists only to put a question to a man who wanted to argue with God. Look at Behemoth, the voice from the storm says. I made it beside you, and you cannot lay a finger on it. Can anyone take it by the eyes, or run a hook through its nose? The point is not the animal. It is the distance between what a person can master and what only the maker of the world can come near. Behemoth lies down under the lotus, in the cover of the reeds and the marsh, and no spear lifted by human hands means anything to it. That is the whole lesson, delivered in muscle and bone.

Its powers are mostly the power of sheer mass. It cannot be hunted, trapped, or killed by anything that shares the earth with it. A river in flood does not move it. It can drink one to the mud and stand unbothered while the current shoves against its legs. Its appetite is colossal and harms nothing, because the land it feeds on renews faster than it can strip it. For all that, its limits are real and built in from the first day. It is bound to its element, the dry ground and its rivers, and never crosses into Leviathan’s water. It was made unable to multiply, its strength capped on purpose. And its long life is not its own to keep. It was set aside at creation for an ending it cannot dodge, kept breathing only until the day it is walked out to die for someone else’s feast. The mightiest land animal ever imagined turns out, in the end, to be something held in reserve.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Behemoth?

Behemoth is a colossal primordial land beast of Jewish and Christian tradition, first described in the book of Job as an unconquerable grass-eating creature with bones like bronze and limbs like iron. It represents God’s power over the earth and is paired with the sea-monster Leviathan. No human can capture or kill it; only its creator can approach it with a weapon.

Is Behemoth a hippopotamus?

Many readers have identified Behemoth with the hippopotamus, since the biblical description places it in a river marsh among reeds, and its Hebrew name may derive from an Egyptian phrase for the water-ox. However, details such as the tail “like a cedar” fit no real animal, and later Jewish tradition treats Behemoth as a unique mythic beast rather than an ordinary creature. The Hebrew word is an intensified plural meaning something like “the beast above all beasts.”

How are Behemoth and Leviathan connected?

Behemoth and Leviathan are a matched pair in Jewish tradition: Behemoth rules the dry land while Leviathan rules the sea. Both were created at the beginning of the world, made too dangerous to be allowed to multiply, and kept in reserve. At the end of days the two are said to fight and kill each other, after which their flesh is served to the righteous.

What happens to Behemoth at the end of the world?

According to Jewish tradition, Behemoth will be brought out at the end of days to battle Leviathan, and the two monsters will destroy each other. Their meat will then be served to the righteous at a great messianic banquet, with the pious feasting beneath canopies made from Leviathan’s hide. Behemoth’s entire existence is described as a long wait for this appointed end.

Where does Behemoth live?

In the book of Job, Behemoth lives in river marshes, lying among lotus plants, reeds, and willows and drinking from the river. Later texts place it on dry land away from the sea: the Book of Enoch sets it in an invisible desert east of Eden called Dendain, and another tradition gives it a thousand mountains to graze each day.

Related Entries

Leviathan, Ziz, Tannin, Lotan, Anak, Nephilim, Tiamat, Apep/Apophis, Jörmungandr, Cipactli, Bahamut, Bashe, Aspidochelone