The Great Beast of the Land
Behemoth appears in Job 40, the land beast God displays to Job. It eats grass like an ox; its strength is in its loins, its power in the muscles of its belly. It sways its tail like a cedar, its bones are tubes of bronze, its limbs like bars of iron. It lies under the lotus plants, hidden among reeds and marsh, unafraid when the river rages — confident though the Jordan surge against its mouth. The text calls it 'the first of the works of God.' The Hebrew word is the plural of behemah, 'beast,' used here as an intensive: the beast of beasts. Modern commentators most often identify its model as the hippopotamus of the Nile and Jordan valleys, though the wild ox and the water buffalo have also been proposed.
Second Temple literature pairs Behemoth with Leviathan. 1 Enoch 60 relates that at creation the two were separated: Leviathan, the female, to the depths of the sea; Behemoth, the male, to a wilderness east of Eden called Dundayin. 4 Ezra 6 likewise places their creation on the fifth day. Rabbinic tradition adds that at the end of days the two beasts will fight and fall together, and their flesh will be served to the righteous at the messianic banquet.
Like Leviathan, the name passed into Western usage as a byword for anything of monstrous size, from Hobbes's Behemoth, his account of the English Civil War, to everyday speech about giant institutions and machines.
