BEHEMOTH

(Hebrew.) The name of an animal, of which some of the characters and attributes are described in poetical language in the 40th chapter of the Book of Job. Much pains have been taken to identify the creature here referred to; but it must be remembered that the discovery and general adoption of a mode of description which combines at once exactne with brevity, and is applicable only to the object described, are the results of a recent and highly advanced state of zoological science. Even the prosaic, and, so far as they went, scientific descriptions of animals in the writings of Aristotle, are rarely so copious and precise as to enable a modern naturalist to identify the existing species there referred to. But ttie aim of Job in the verses in which he sings of Thau, Leviathan, Behemoth, was to show forth the power and wisdom of the Deity, and lower the pride of man, by appealing to the wonderful powers a igned to some of the most remarkable and formidable objects of animated nature with which he was acquainted; and it can hardly therefore be expected that curiosity, eager to hunt out the precise species alluded to, should be gratified. Sufficient source of doubt has always been left to shake the most sagacious conjectures; and some recent inquirers into Biblical zoology, perceiving that the properties of Behemoth were not manifested to the letter in any known existing species, have endeavoured to make the scriptural allusions square with the characters of one of the gigantic extinct animals which the study of fo il remains has brought to light: the Iguanodon, for example,a supposed herbivorous reptile, with a horn on the nose and a long and flexible tail, has been selected as the species described by Job. The allusion, in verse 17, to a part of the generative organs, which is visible externally only in the cla of mammal i a, renders it very improbable that Behemoth could be one of the Reptilia. The exclamation, also, M Behold he drinketh up a river and hasteth not! He trusteth that he can draw up Jordan into his mouth," could not with any appearance of truth be applied to a species of a cla of animals of which the organization requires them to drink so little and so seldom. If a mammiferous quadruped, then Behemoth was a herbivorous and ungulate species: " He eateth gra as an ox" (verse 15); but, unlike the males of the larger ruminants, he had not a divided scrotum, for " the sinews of his stones were wrapt together" (verse 17.) Thus from the few zoological characters which are brought under our consideration, we come, to the conclusion that some huge pachyderm, "whose haunt was in the fens, whose place of retreat was encompa ed by the willows of the brook, and overshadowed by trees, was " the chief of the ways of God," in the language and mind of the sacred poet. As there exist differences of opinion among the best Hebrew scholars as to the exact signification of the first part of verse 17, which some have rendered ''He sitteth up," and of the second part of verse 19, where allusion is made to some weapon, these become obviously unsafe elements, in the consideration of the zoological problem. [s. 154]