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| Gustave Dore's portrayal of Psalm 74 |
Creationists like Ken Ham have duped a generation of evangelicals into believing dinosaurs are mentioned in the Bible. In fact, it seems most of the involved Christians I know in the Southern Baptist circles I have spent my life actually believe Leviathan and Behemoth in Job are ancient descriptions of a plesiosaur and sauropod. According to Ken Ham:
"[V]ery few animals are singled out in the Bible for such a detailed description. Contrary to what many may think, what we know now as dinosaurs get more mention in the Scriptures than most animals!"
The following will serve as an object lesson in how
evangelicals can be guilty of bending and torturing scripture to subject it to
their own agenda. Let’s look at some of the other passages creationists conveniently chooses not
to mention.
According to the Bible Leviathan:
1)
Has glowing eyes “like
rays of the dawn” (Job 41.18)
2)
Breathes fire " (Job
41.19-21)
3)
Has multiple heads
(Ps. 74.14 “[God] You crushed the heads [plural] of Leviathan [singular]”)
4)
Will be destroyed by God
at the eschaton (Isaiah 27.1 “In that day the LORD…will punish Leviathan the
fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent, and he will slay the dragon
that is in the sea.”)
If you believe Leviathan is a plesiosaur, you must be willing
to swallow the existence of an eye-glowing, fire-breathing, multiple-headed,
natural animal which will still be living by the time the end of the world
comes around in order that God may “punish” him with death. (Apparently God is
angry with this multi-headed “dinosaur.”)
As you are trying to choke down that pill let’s ask if there is
a better alternative out there. The fact
is Leviathan’s epithets contained in the Hebrew Bible (titles like “slithering
serpent” and “twisting serpent”) can be found word-for-word in the surrounding
literature of the Ancient Mediterranean. In those texts he is associated
with creation, shares the etymology Ltn, breathes fire and has
seven heads. Those texts define him as a chaos deity (explaining
Psalm 74’s affinities for Babylonian chaoskampf like that found in
the Enuma Elish tablets and Isaiah’s metaphorical second
slaying of the creature at the return of Christ). Let’s compare a text written by one of
Israel’s pagan neighbors with the leviathan of the Bible: [i]
The Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible
contains leading scholarship in Semitic studies. Below is a portion of its entries on
Leviathan and Behemoth:
Frankly, if you are going to argue that a creature like
Leviathan is a plesioaur, and that the author of Job received revelation of
this, you have to concede that Baal worshipers like those at Ugarit were
receiving the same fire-breathing, seven-headed revelation.
The spectre of a mythological dragon looms heavy on the evangelical mind. But just because the Biblical authors use this type of imagery, does it mean that we must believe these creatures exists in the natural world?
Here is a question: In Psalm 74 God crushes and kills Leviathan as part of the act of creation (the Near Eastern idea of chaoskampf). But Isaiah has him being killed a second and final time at the eschaton (27.1). This is an exegetical dilemma which must be explained. Apparently the authors of scripture are doing more than just describing a mere natural animal. They are using the creatures Leviathan and Behemoth as a symbol for something. We are the ones who miss the meaning due to our refusal to contextualize the text.
Why are Dragons Found in Every Ancient Culture in the World?
As an aside note to the external non-biblical data, creationists are quick to demonstrate their particular
interpretation of the Biblical data by making the argument that dragons can be
found worldwide in ancient cultures. The
claim is that this evinces the cohabitation of man and dinosaurs in ancient
memory. I think people who do this are
actually on to something here, but not in the direction they take it.
There is a much simpler, much more boring explanation: We
have been finding fossils of dinosaurs for thousands of years and have been
inventing all sorts of monster mythologies to account for these fossils. (Sorry
Rob Skiba: there were no real centaurs in history and Santa doesn't exist either.) Such
is the thesis of Adrienne Mayor from Stanford.
Her books trace ancient fossil hunting history and mythology in regions
like Native North America, Greece and Rome.
It’s not just dragons. People in
the ancient world are known to have offered fossil remains of griffins, centaurs, cyclopes, and giants too. If
you are an ancient Roman at a construction site and your team exhumes a T-Rex,
you are going to believe in a past age of dragons. If you are an ancient Scythian nomad and you
encounter protoceratops remains you are going to interpret them as a
griffin. If you are an ancient Sioux who
finds himself upon pteranodon remains you are going to invent the thunderbird
legend. In many cases it is certain that ancient people were offering extinct animal fossils as the origin of mythological creatures, and it is more than coincidence that these myths happen to originate in places with a lot of fossil beds. Some of those fossil beds were named and Hadrian is known to have collected some near Troy. Many were venerated in temples like in the temple of Hera on Samos. The cyclops myth has been shown to likely derive from Greek misinterpretation of Mammoth skulls. Solinus flat out says these bones were exhumed from ravines. The people of Samos excavated a creature they called a Nead. Aelian claims the giant Neads once roamed Samos and that its ancient bones were on display in his day. The point is fossil hunting isn't new.
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| The trunk cavity of a mammoth skull would be easily mistaken as an eye socket. |
Regardless of your views on creation, let’s stop protecting ourselves from the Bible and stop demythologizing the text to fit into our modern agendas. We need to attempt to read the text in its Ancient Near Eastern context – the context God Himself chose to inspire it in.
[i] C.f.
Aicha Rahmouni, Divine Epithets in the Ugaritic Alphabetic Texts (Netherlands:
Brill 2008), 142ff.
