Is the Hippopotamus in the Bible? Not by Name, but Many Identify Job’s Behemoth as One

No, not by name. The nearest the Bible comes is Behemoth, the grass-eating giant of Job 40:15–24, which many modern translators and commentators identify with the hippopotamus, and a few English versions print “hippopotamus” there. Others read Behemoth as an elephant or a mythical monster, and some young-earth creationists read it as a dinosaur.

Who is Behemoth in Job 40?

Behemoth appears once, near the end of the Book of Job. After Job has accused God of treating him unjustly, God answers him “out of the whirlwind” (Job 40:6) and sets before him two creatures that no human can master: Behemoth, and then Leviathan in chapter 41. The description of Behemoth begins:

“Behold, Behemoth, which I made as I made you; he eats grass like an ox. Behold, his strength in his loins, and his power in the muscles of his belly. He makes his tail stiff like a cedar; the sinews of his thighs are knit together. His bones are tubes of bronze, his limbs like bars of iron. He is the first of the works of God; let him who made him bring near his sword!” (Job 40:15–19)

The passage goes on to say that he lies under the lotus plants “in the shelter of the reeds and in the marsh,” that a turbulent river does not frighten him, and that no one can take him by the eyes or pierce his nose with a snare (Job 40:21–24).

In Hebrew, behemoth has the form of a plural of behemah, the ordinary word for “beast” or “cattle.” Elsewhere the same form simply means “beasts,” as in Deuteronomy 32:24 and Habakkuk 2:17. In Job it works as a name, “the beast” above all others, and most English Bibles leave it untranslated. An older theory traced the word to an Egyptian phrase meaning “water ox,” a name for the hippopotamus. No such phrase is known in Egyptian, and the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia notes that the scholar T. K. Cheyne and others rejected the derivation.

Why many identify Behemoth with the hippopotamus

Several details fit the animal. A wild hippo eats almost nothing but grass, which it crops on land at night, and it spends the day in rivers and marshes. The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia judged that the description “applies on the whole very well to the hippopotamus,” and pointed to “its great size, its eating grass, the difficulty with which weapons penetrate its hide, and its frequenting of streams.”

Many modern Bibles say so in their notes. The Revised Standard Version and the Amplified Bible add “or the hippopotamus” at Job 40:15, and the New American Standard Bible calls Behemoth “a powerful animal, possibly a hippopotamus.” The Contemporary English Version and The Living Bible put “hippopotamus” in the text itself. The English Standard Version is more cautious: “A large animal, exact identity uncertain.” Russian took its everyday word for the hippopotamus, begemot, from Behemoth in the mid-eighteenth century.

The people who first heard the Book of Job could have known the animal. Hippos lived along the Egyptian Nile for most of recorded history, and they also lived in Israel. A 2009 survey of animal bones from archaeological sites in the southern Levant found hippopotamus remains mostly along the rivers and swamps of the coastal plain; the latest, from Tel Miqne-Ekron, Tel Dor and Tel Qasile, date to the Iron Age (about 1200–586 BC), when the species died out in the region.

Could Behemoth be an elephant?

Thomas Aquinas, in his thirteenth-century commentary on Job, took Behemoth to be the elephant and Leviathan the whale: “Among all land animals, the elephant excels in size and strength, and among aquatic animals the whale. So the Lord describes the devil using the metaphor of an elephant and a whale.” For Aquinas the animal stood for Satan, whom the Book of Job names as the cause of Job’s suffering. Gregory the Great had already read Behemoth as a figure of the devil in his Moralia on Job, written between 578 and 595: “Whom does He suggest, under the name ‘Behemoth,’ except the ancient enemy?”

Is Behemoth a mythical creature?

Other scholars read Behemoth, with Leviathan, as a monster of myth, drawn partly from real animals but larger than any of them. The notes of the New American Bible, Revised Edition call Behemoth “a primeval monster of chaos; identified by some scholars as the hippopotamus, on which the description of Behemoth is partially based,” and say that the point of the passage is that “only the Lord, not Job, can control the cosmic evil which these forces symbolize.” The NET Bible’s notes name Hermann Gunkel and Marvin Pope among scholars who took the two creatures as mythological.

Jewish writings from the first centuries BC and AD developed the idea. In 2 Esdras, God keeps two creatures, Behemoth on land “where there are a thousand mountains” and Leviathan in the sea, “to be eaten by whom you wish and when you wish” (2 Esdras 6:49–52), and 1 Enoch 60:7–8 and 2 Baruch 29:4 pair them in the same way.

Was Behemoth a dinosaur?

Some young-earth creationists identify Behemoth as a sauropod, one of the long-necked, long-tailed dinosaurs. Their main evidence is verse 17. In a 2001 article in the Journal of Creation, republished by Answers in Genesis, Allan Steel argued that “the tail of Behemoth is compared to a cedar for its great size,” that “the hippopotamus’ tail is short and fat,” and that the elephant’s is no better, so that “some type of extinct dinosaur should still be considered a perfectly reasonable possibility.” The NET Bible’s notes also cite the creationist Henry Morris, in The Remarkable Record of Job, for the dinosaur reading.

A hippo’s tail is indeed short, about 35 to 56 centimeters (14 to 22 inches). The argument turns on a Hebrew verb of uncertain meaning, and translations differ: the King James Version has “He moveth his tail like a cedar,” the New International Version “Its tail sways like a cedar,” and the English Standard Version “He makes his tail stiff like a cedar.” Steel rejected the sense “stiffen” as a translation made to fit the hippopotamus. Against the dinosaur reading, geologists date the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs to about 66 million years ago, long before the first humans, and most scholars take Behemoth to be a real animal. The NET Bible’s note sums up that view: “Most would say they are real animals, but probably mythologized by the pagans.”

Does a hippopotamus in a dream have a biblical meaning?

No passage of Scripture mentions a hippopotamus in a dream or gives the animal a spiritual meaning. Meanings sometimes given for a hippo in a dream, such as strength, stability or a call to spiritual cleansing, have no basis in the biblical text.

The hippopotamus did have religious meaning in ancient Egypt. Taweret, the protective goddess of childbirth and fertility, was shown as a hippopotamus standing upright, and in Egyptian myth the god Set took the form of a red hippopotamus to fight Horus and was defeated.

Related reading

• What is the Leviathan in the Bible?
• Are crocodiles in the Bible?
• Elephants are not in the Bible, but their ivory is