Are dinosaurs in the bible?Dinosaur-like creatures are mentioned in the Bible. The Bible uses ancient names like “behemoth” (beh-HEE-moth) and “tannin.” Behemoth means kingly, gigantic beasts. Tannin is a term which includes dragon-like animals and the great sea creatures such as whales, giant squids, and marine reptiles like the plesiosaurs (PLEE-see-oh-sors) that may have become extinct (died out). The Bible’s best description of a dinosaur-like animal is in Job chapter 40…
The book of Job is very old, written after the worldwide flood of Noah’s time and probably about 2,000 years before Jesus was born. Here God describes a great king of the land animals like some of the biggest dinosaurs, the Diplodocus and Apatosaurus. It was a gigantic plant-eater with great muscles and very strong bones. The long Diplodocus had leg bones so strong that he could have held three others on his back. The behemoth were not afraid. They did not need to be; they were huge. Behemoth tails were so long and strong that God compared them to cedars—one of the largest and most spectacular trees of the ancient world. After all the behemoth had died out, many people forgot about them. Dinosaurs were extinct and the fossil skeletons that are in museums today did not begin to be put together until about 150 years ago. Today, some people have mistakenly guessed that the behemoth mentioned in the Bible might be an elephant or a hippopotamus. But those animals do not have tails like the thick, tall trunks of cedar trees! What is the leviathan mentioned in the Bible? (sea monsters) ORIGIN—Where did the dinosaurs come from? WHY did dinosaurs become EXTINCT? NOAH’S ARK—Did Noah take dinosaurs on the Ark? LIVING WITH DINOSAURS—What would it have been like to live with dinosaurs? Copyright ©, Paul S. Taylor, ChristianAnswers. All rights reserved. |