This morning at church a friend was talking about creation vs. evolution with her 11-year-old son, and she turned to me at one point and asked me, “What is the name of that Bible animal that nobody really knows what it is, but they say it proves that dinosaurs are in the Bible?” I didn’t really know what she was talking about, but the only problematic Bible animal name I knew was “leviathan”. She said, “Yes, that’s it!”
I had never heard that the creationists use this to prove that dinosaurs ARE SO in the Bible, but another friend who was standing nearby said, “Yeah, I’ve heard it dozens of times.”
So I came home and did some research with my handy-dandy New American Standard Electronic Bible Library.
So now my question is, how do you extrapolate from “serpent” to “dinosaur”? Are you assuming it means a plesiosaur? How do you get that? Couldn’t it just be a giant squid or octopus?
Or is it just one more of those things that we are supposed to take on faith?
I’ve seen this brought up several times over at the LBMB. Here’s the thought process, near as I can dissect it:
–The Bible is literal and inerrant.
–Since humans have been around since the universe was about a week old, dinosaurs and humans had to have co-existed.
–If a bunch of creatures that big were roaming the Earth, wouldn’t someone have written about them? Answer: they did, and called it a leviathan.
Let’s face it–if you really do believe the world is only 6000 years old and the Genesis account is completely literal (and I didn’t think there were many such people until I started hanging out on the LBMB), it requires a lot of rationalization and justification. Don’t expect much of it to make sense.
I read this creationist’s take on it. Talking about how in Chinese mythology there’s the dragon, which must be the dinosaur. The leviathan thing was in there too. BTW, what’s the LBMB?
Golly. DoctorJ, thanks for the breakdown. The mind boggles. Logic is not normally my strong suit, but even I can tell that there are holes there big enough to drive the Starship Enterprise through. And talk about your major league assumptions. I’d start trying to analyze it, except I don’t know whether it’s worth it.
Jello, the LBMB stands for the Left Behind Message Board, a strongly fundamentalist MB. Jenkinsfan is our latest visitor from Over There. I was kind of hoping he’d show up in this thread and explain this “leviathan” thing to me. I WANT to understand it, really I do.
Well, I’m no creationist, but I believe there is also a Bible reference to a “Behemoth” (in Job, perhaps?) to which creationists also point as a supposed Bible reference to dinosaurs. Anybody have a Bible handy?
Plesiosaurs aren’t dinosaurs. In fact, if a reptile is aquatic or capable of flight, it is by definition not a dinosaur. If we accept that this “leviathan” critter does in fact live underwater, that means that it is expressly excluded from true dinosaurhood.
There we go! They MUST be talking about dinosaurs! These certainly can’t be references to OTHER “Big things” that you ignorant people claim were roaming the Earth at the same time! Yabba Dabba Doo!
Most Scripture scholars I know of tend to assume that the leviathan is the Nile crocodile and the behemoth is the hippopotamus.
Perhaps they’re right (seems plausible enough to me), perhaps not, but it seems silly that, in trying to make a point to Job, God would allude to a creature Job had never seen and had never heard of. Dinosaurs were long gone by the time man came along, so God could hardly have expected Job to know what a brontosaurus was (if THAT was what God meant).
Homeslice, you have more courage to say what I couldn’t… I salute you.
However, I would have also wondered why the Bible didn’t mention Polar Kraken’s and Phyrexian Dreadnaughts…
Astorian…
I assume that those arguing that “leviathan” meant “dinosaur” are creationists or something that claim the universe is only 6,000 years old, and that dinosaurs really existed with mankind for a while. Of course, this “leviathan=dinosaur” crowd is probably a group all of their own.
The Behemoth description sounds nothing like a hippo. For example: “He moveth his tail like a cedar”–Hippos have small, weak tails. I think that Hippo-behemoth classification is bogus.
DoctorJ where or how do you figure the earth is only 6000 years old. I am not denying what you say is true, just that I would like to know how you got that figure. I plan to use that point in an agrument I have been having but would like to have a way to back that up.
Can’t they use carbon dating to prove things are over 6000 years old?
Creationists arrive at a date of 4004 B.C. for the creation of the Earth by using Bishop Ussher’s 17th century calculations, in which he added up the ages of all of the patriarchs mentioned in the Bible. Many creationists realize full well that there are even records of civilizations that are older than 6000 years, and furthermore this places the Noachian flood at ~2300 B.C., so you have to explain how the Chinese didn’t notice their own annihilation! As a result, many modern YEC’ers arbitrarily set the date back a few thousand years further, to somewhere between 10-15 thousand years ago. Virtually all YEC’s disdain any sort of radiometric dating, which can be used to prove that the Earth is WAAAAAY older than 10 thousand years (4.55±.02 billion, to be precise). They usually just say that the entire field is hopelessly inaccurate.
So in short, there’s no evidence for a 6000 year old Earth, despite the desires of Biblical literalists.
Also, some Creationists argue that things were “created old”, or something like that. Apparently, they believe that God played us all for saps by making us think the Universe is thousands of times older than it really is. What a loving deity, huh?
OK, to resolve this, we have to go back to the ancient Biblical Hebrew text. The Hebrew word for leviathan has no vowels, so it’s L-V-TH-N. The ancient Hebrew word for dinosaur – well, OK, so there wasn’t such a word, but the modern Hebrew word is D-N-S-R. Now we can rearrange the letters as follows:
L-V-Th-N
R-D-S-N
Note that the Th and S letters in Hebrew are very similar (in fact, only distinguished by a dot which isn’t even used in the oldest manuscripts.) Also, of course, Hebrew is related to Chinese and we all know how the Chinese can’t distinguish between L and R. So now by substituting Th for S and L for R in Dinosaur, we have:
L-V-Th-N
L-D-Th-N
Well, there ya go. The words are practically identical. I mean, you wouldn’t let one little letter stand in the way of blind belief, would you. And here’s the clincher: the difference in the two words are the letters D-V, and we all known that stands for D-V-D, an ancient computer-like device that played – no, no, wait, that stands for DAVID, the Biblical king, guy who killed Goliath. And what was Goliath? A Giant, an enormous-sized brontosaurus-like being.
Well I am another convert from the LBMB. Over there my screen name is RaptureNow12 but I changed it to go here so it would not offend anyone. Anyway on the subject of the Leviathan the New Bible Dictionary notes the following: “The context of its use in the Old Testament some form of aquatic monster. In Psalms 104:26 it is clearly of the sea and is generally thought to be the whale, although the dolphin has been suggested. It also refers to a dragon or crocodile in Job.”
