During the trials of Job, he foolishly charged God with unfairness in the way things had been done and declared his desire to face God and tell Him how things ought to be managed.  This resulted in Job being confronted by God who made it plain to the afflicted patriarch that God was well qualified to be in charge and running things on earth just fine.  God accomplished this by asking Job a series of questions designed to illustrate to Job the power, wisdom and glory of God in comparison to the relatively insignificant characteristics and abilities of Job.  During the course of this confrontation, God instructed Job to behold two great beasts which were described in detail in the written record.  The purpose of this lesson is to look closely at these two creatures and identify them from an examination of the clues found in the written account. 

What are these flesh-and-blood creatures that God used to impress upon Job his puniness when compared with God’s infinite power?  Some scholars thought that perhaps behemoth was the elephant, while leviathan was the whale but today the prevailing view among modern critics is that Behemoth was a hippopotamus and Leviathan was a crocodile.  Their basic claim is that the hippopotamus fits many of the characteristics of behemoth, while the crocodile aligns itself very closely with leviathan. This position has become so popular in modern times that few commentators have bothered to challenge the proposed identification of these beasts. In fact, even some versions of the Bible identify these creatures in the marginal notes or chapter headings as the hippopotamus and the crocodile. These modern critics label these two animals confidently but give no evidence to support their conclusions.  This is called "truth by assertion".  In other words, I believe this, I say it, so that's how it is. 

In identifying these two beasts it is first most important that we eliminate what they are not.  These beasts are not representations of mythological animals in any way.  God was using a long list of real literal things to make his point to Job.  If Behemoth and Leviathan were imaginative creatures which existed only in the imagination of Job and others, then God's case to Job was worthless.  God was demonstrating His supremacy and omnipotence to Job.  For God to use an imaginary creature for this purpose would be the equivalent of someone today doing a similar thing by claiming to have made and be in control of something that did not exist. 

To illustrate this, consider one of the mythological beasts from the Greek and Roman culture.  According to Greek mythology, the gates to Hades were guarded by a gigantic three headed dog named Cerberus.  This animal was said to prevent anyone who had died and gone into Hades from coming back.  This beast is completely mythological and does not exist nor was any such beast ever seen by mankind.  Suppose someone were to try and set him or herself up as being quite heroic and mighty by using the imaginary Cerberus as beast he or she both created and could control?  It would be nonsense and the effort would fail immediately.  Such is the case with God's use of Behemoth and Leviathan in His case to Job.

Behemoth and Leviathan were real life flesh and blood creatures which Job had seen before and was familiar with.  It is significant to note that when God introduced Behemoth into the discussion, He used the word "Behold".  One does not tell someone to "behold" or to "look at" something that does not exist and is not able to be seen. 

Behemoth The Hippopotamus and Leviathan the Crocodile?

While it is true that a few similarities do exist between the behemoth and the hippo, and between the leviathan and the crocodile, many of the descriptive details do not seem to fit either creature. These differences are so numerous and significant that they cannot be overlooked.

God described the behemoth as a creature that “moveth his tail like a cedar” (40:17). The tail of a hippopotamus in no way whatsoever resembles a cedar tree. The tail of the hippo is short and small like that of a pig, and is a mere twig in comparison with a cedar tree.  But that fact has not prevented commentators from attempting to avoid the obvious. 

The behemoth is said to be “chief [i.e., largest] of the ways of God” (40:19). Surely this would rule out the hippo, since at full size it is but seven feet high.  An elephant is twice the size of a hippopotamus and its tail is nowhere near in comparison of a cedar either.  Furthermore, Behemoth is not considered to be an elephant because in the description of his characteristics, no mention is made of a trunk which is the most prominent part an elephant that there is.  A hippopotamus weighing in at a mere 4 tons is not the largest of the ways of God.  In comparison to many extinct animals we know existed on earth, the hippo is a mere shadow of the enormous animals that once walked the earth who did possess tails like cedars. 

The text of (40:19) indicates that no one but God could approach the behemoth with a sword, nor was he able to be captured (40:24).  Egyptian pharaohs took pride in slaying a hippopotamus. There are numerous pictures in which the pharaoh, hunting a hippopotamus from a papyrus boat, is poised to hurl his harpoon into the animal’s opened mouth, thereby inflicting a fatal blow.  Egyptians celebrated festivals known as “Harpooning the Hippopotamus”.  Additionally, Egyptian monuments frequently picture single hunters attacking the hippo with a spear. How could one accurately compare the unapproachable and uncatchable behemoth with a hippopotamus?

The Behemoth has great strength in his loins and in the naval of his belly (V16).  The behemoth is capable of standing on his hind legs like an elephant.  But the Behemoth is not an elephant.  An elephant does not have and move a tail like a cedar tree (V17).  The Behemoth is afraid of nothing and does not move away from danger.  The text indicates that he lies about fearlessly in the shade of the trees.  Verse 23 says that when he drinks, he drinks up a river.  Surely this imagery is not of an animal weighing 4 tons, rather it is of an animal that is of considerable size who is able to drink a quantity of water significant enough to warrant the description given in the text. 

The leviathan also is represented as unapproachable and too mighty to be apprehended by men. The Lord said to Job:

Job 41:1-2
"Can you draw out Leviathan* with a hook, Or snare his tongue with a line which you lower? Can you put a reed through his nose, Or pierce his jaw with a hook?"

According to God, Leviathan’s “His sneezings flash forth light, And his eyes are like the eyelids of the morning. Out of his mouth go burning lights; Sparks of fire shoot out. Smoke goes out of his nostrils, As from a boiling pot and burning rushes. His breath kindles coals, And a flame goes out of his mouth.” (Job 41:18-21). Now this is a terrible picture of Leviathan.  A fire breathing dragon?  This is without a doubt the hardest part of the account of Behemoth and Leviathan to take as fact.  However, there are numerous ancient cultures on the earth who have fire breathing dragons in their legends and folklore.  While that fact is not to be taken as absolute proof of the existence of animals who can breath fire, it is certainly true that most legends and folklore are rooted in some kind of founding fact. 

And what about animals on earth today who exhibit similar fantastic characteristics?  Fire flies produce light, eels produce electricity, and bombardier beetles produce explosive chemical reactions. All of these involve complex chemical processes, and it does not seem at all impossible that an animal might be given the ability to breathe out certain gaseous fumes which, upon coming in contact with air, would ignite.  We know for a fact that animals produce methane gas from digestion which is most certainly flammable.  It is presumptuous merely to write the idea of an animal which can exhale a gas that is capable of being ignited off as impossible. To say that the leviathan could not do this is to say much more than we know about Leviathan. 

When leviathan “raiseth himself up, the mighty are afraid: Because of his crashings they are beside themselves.... He beholds every high thing: He is king over all the children of pride” (Job 41:25,34).  This animal raises himself up and crashes into the water.  He looks down on everything high.  This animal is enormous and when he is exhibiting these characteristics in the sight of men, they want nothing to do with him.  His very appearance is terrifying.  This is not the description of any animal alive on earth today, certainly not a crocodile.  However it does bear significant resemblance to animals, now extinct, that we know existed upon the earth in the past from the fossil record. 

Job 41:30
"His undersides are like sharp potsherds"

This is certainly not the description of a crocodile or any other reptile we know of on earth today that could possibly be compared to the beast being set forth to Job.  When one wants to kill a crocodile or other similar reptile, it is the underside of their bellies which are the most vulnerable to attack by weapons.  Especially the weapons which were available in Job's day.  Leviathan was described as an animal that could not be defeated by swords, spears or darts (V26). 

Job 41:31-32
"He makes the deep boil like a pot; He makes the sea like a pot of ointment.  He leaves a shining wake behind him; One would think the deep had white hair."

This is most definitely an animal who lives in the sea where the water is deep and where a shining wake can be left behind him.  This is not a river dwelling animal in any sense of the description whatsoever.  Notice what the Psalmist wrote in reference to Leviathan in Psalms 104:25-26, "This great and wide sea, In which are innumerable teeming things, Living things both small and great. There the ships sail about; There is that Leviathan Which You have made to play there."

In referring back to Leviathan raising himself up to behold all the high things, it cannot be denied that this creature who lives in the sea and not in rivers is raising himself up to a height higher than the ships which sailed the seas.  One must ask, what kind of animal living today can accomplish this?  There are none.  The crocodile who is the closest living match to the Leviathan is not even in the same scope as the animal described in Job 41. 

Uncatchable, undefeatable, unconquerable, living in the sea, breathing fire and smoke, raising himself up to look down on all things beneath him and crashing himself into the sea.  The mighty are afraid of him, the idea of capturing him is hopeless, lay your hand on him and remember the battle.  Never do it again.  There is no animal alive on earth today that even comes close to matching the Leviathan.  He can be nothing other than a great and monstrous water dwelling reptile of some sort that lived at the time of the writing of Job and of Psalms but is now extinct. 

Bible scholars who try and match these animals up with living examples of animals today are wasting their time and are ignoring numerous facts from the text in order to do so.  There is plenty of evidence other than the Biblical account of Behemoth and Leviathan that places animals of this magnitude in existence on earth with mankind. 

In the early 1920s, archaeologist Samuel Hubbard uncovered Indian petroglyphs in the Hava Supai area of the Grand Canyon. Among them were representations of easily recognizable creatures, including the ibex, the buffalo and the dinosaur. In fact, a reproduction of the dinosaur petroglyph graced the front cover of the scientific monograph authored by Dr. Hubbard and published under the auspices of the Oakland, California Museum of Natural History (where Dr. Hubbard served as the honorary curatory of archaeology). Upon seeing the petroglyph of the dinosaur, Dr. Hubbard remarked:

"Taken all in all, the proportions are good. The huge reptile is depicted in the attitude in which man would be most likely to see it—reared on its hind legs, balancing with the long tail, either feeding or in fighting position, possibly defending itself against a party of men"

In the book, The Great Dinosaur Mystery and the Bible, there is a reproduction of the Hava Supai dinosaur petroglyph, side-by-side with a representation from the evolutionists’ texts of the dinosaur known as Edmontosaurus. The two are indistinguishable. And that, in this context, raises an important question: How could Indians draw such accurate pictures of a creature they never had seen?

Eugenia Cabrera is currently the Director of the Ica Stone Museum located in Ica, Peru. Her father, Dr. Javier Cabrera, starting in the 1930s, collected most of the 11,000 Ica stones that fill the museum she directs. The stones are controversial, to say the least. Depicted on the stones are what appear to be relics of an ancient Indian culture that predated the Incas. Many of the carved stones exhibit mundane scenes that would be expected in any ancient culture. But some of the carvings portray humans in close contact with dinosaurs. Some of these stones depicted accurate drawings of dinosaurs which had not yet been discovered in the fossil record and some illustrated skin characteristics and textures which have since then been verified in the fossil record but were before that unknown. 

There are scenes of men hunting dinosaurs, riding dinosaurs, and leading them by ropes around their necks which present a real problem for the evolutionary scenario that humans and dinosaurs were separated by millions of years.  Of course the evolutionary scientific community has labeled the entire collection a fraud because of the dinosaur carvings and that is exactly what would be expected, since the authentication of the stones would effectively annihilate decades of evolutionary theory as it relates to dinosaurs.  The authenticity of these carvings has never been proven to be false.  One must ask, how could the carvers of these stones know what a dinosaur looked like unless they had seen them? 

In a small, obscure town of Acambaro in the state of Guanajuato in Mexico is one of the most unique antiquities collections in the world.  In 1945, a German hardware merchant named Waldemar Julsrud happened across a half-buried clay figurine at the bottom of a mountain known as el Toro (the Bull). Julsrud was no stranger to artifacts of ancient civilizations. He owned one of the most valuable and extensive collections of Chupicuaro pottery in existence.  The newly discovered clay figurines did not match any ancient civilization with which Julsrud was familiar.

The clay figurines intrigued Julsrud and he wanted to know if more were buried nearby. He made an arrangement with one of his employees, Odilon Tinajero, to dig in the area in an attempt to find more pieces. Julsrud agreed to pay Tinajero one peso for every figurine that was complete, or could be easily put back together. In all, Julsrud eventually collected over 33,500 figurines. The sheer number of figurines was enough to turn heads, but the fact that many of the figurines depicted reptiles that closely resembled dinosaurs in direct contact and interaction with human figures was even more startling to the scientific community.

As expected, the evolutionary society moved to discredit the find but there is one inescapable fact about these figurines which evolutionists cannot deny.  There was knowledge of Dinosaur anatomy evident in the figurines, discovered decades earlier, that was not known until the 1990's.  Prior to the early 1990s, the plant eating dinosaurs were constructed with smooth backs. The huge plant-eating dinosaurs such as Diplodicus, Argentinasaurus, and Brachiosaurus were believed to have no spikes on their backs, and were drawn without them in journals, books, magazines. 

In 1992, it was discovered that sauropods did have spines or spikes. The Julsrud collection was discovered between 1945-1953, over 40 years prior to the discovery of spikes on the backs of the sauropods. If a person attempted to fake the figurines, he would not have put spines on the backs of sauropod dinosaurs. Yet, even a cursory inspection of photographs from the Julsrud collection shows that the sauropod dinosaurs in the collection have spines.

in 1983, researchers reported in the science and engineering news section of The Moscow News that they had discovered what appeared to be a human footprint in 150-million-year-old Jurassic rock, next to a giant, three-toed dinosaur footprint. The article stated:

"This spring, an expedition from the Institute of Geology of the Turkmen SSR Academy of Sciences found over 1,500 tracks left by dinosaurs in the mountains in the southeast of the Republic. Impressions resembling in shape a human footprint were discovered next to the tracks of prehistoric animals."  Naturally, this report has received precious little attention, given the mindset of evolutionists.

These examples of evidence of Dinosaurs co-existence with mankind are but a trifling sample of what is available out there.  But it is enough to raise the question in the minds of the honest as to the efforts of the scientific community to suppress or ignore the facts which are evident all around them.  It is quite obvious that both biblical and scientific evidence support the coexistence of man and dinosaurs at some point in the not-too-distant past.