Does the Bible speak of dinosaurs?

These verses do not list every animal by name. They speak of all of them together: the beasts of the earth, everything that creeps on the earth, and every living creature the waters brought forth. If dinosaurs were real animals of the earth, these statements include them.

A psalm of praise says the same about the sea:

Scripture teaches this: God made the creatures of the land and of the waters, and the animals people call dinosaurs belong within that statement.

That says the animals are included. It does not point to one creature in Scripture and say "this one is a dinosaur." The word "kind" in Genesis was also not matched to any modern scientific grouping.

Some argue that because the word "dinosaur" is missing, the Bible cannot speak of these animals at all. That does not follow. Genesis 1:25 speaks of every beast of the earth without needing a separate name for each one.

Searches for "dinosaur" and "dinosaurs" found no match in the King James Bible that was searched. This finding comes from the search, not from any verse that says such animals did not exist. It is about this word in this translation only. It does not cover other translations, and it does not rule out a description of these animals in other words.

Near the end of the book of Job, the LORD speaks to Job out of a whirlwind:

Then He turns Job's attention to a great creature:

This is a real description of a creature, not an empty name. God made it, it eats grass, it is very strong, it has a tail likened to a cedar, and it lives among trees, reeds, marshes and rivers. These verses are among the strongest reasons people give for a possible dinosaur reference, and they should not be passed over just because the word "dinosaur" is missing.

What the passage does not allow:

• Saying behemoth is only a name with no creature behind it. Job 40:15 says God made it and that it eats grass. The comparisons and the deeper meaning of the passage do not remove those statements.
• Leaving out the tail, or any other detail, to make an identification fit. Any proposed identification has to account for the whole description.

What the passage does not say:

• It gives no measurements. The tail is "like a cedar". Job 40:17 gives a likeness, not a length or a size.
• The bones are not said to be metal. Job 40:18 says the bones are "as strong pieces of brass" and "like bars of iron". These are comparisons for strength.
• It does not say when Job lived or give a history of dinosaurs. "Which I made with thee" (Job 40:15) puts the creature alongside Job as something God made. A search for the words "made with thee" found only this verse.

The tail and the cedar. Elsewhere in Scripture, the Hebrew word for "tail" in Job 40:17 means an animal's real tail:

It is also used as a picture, and where it is, the passage explains the picture itself:

Job 40 gives no such explanation. It sets the tail among the creature's loins, belly, bones and home. So it reads as a real part of the body. None of the other uses that were checked gives a reason to treat it as some other part.

The cedar is a tree:

When Scripture likens something to a cedar, the point of the likeness depends on the passage. Sometimes it is growth, sometimes excellence, sometimes height:

Cedar also appears as building material, in stories and laments, and as a picture of rulers:

Each passage has its own setting. In Judges 9 Jotham tells a story with a political point. Psalms 80 is a prayer that likens a vine's boughs to cedars. Jeremiah 22 rebukes the king's house over its building. Zechariah 11 sets the fallen cedar beside the spoiled mighty ones. Zephaniah 2 names cedar work among Nineveh's ruin. Ezekiel 31 pictures the Assyrian as a cedar. Cedars are also wood used in a cleansing law (Leviticus 14:4), a picture of Israel's tents (Numbers 24:6), trees God breaks and plants (Psalms 29:5; 104:16; Isaiah 41:19), and a parable that Ezekiel 17:12 explains.

Together these show that you have to keep to what the passage itself compares. None of them gives a measurement for behemoth's tail. Some of the other places where "cedar" appears were not opened, so no claim is made about every cedar comparison in Scripture.

The word "moveth". In Job 40:17, the Hebrew word translated "moveth" is translated elsewhere as will, desire, delight or pleased (for example Ruth 3:13; Job 13:3; Jonah 1:14). No new meaning is built from that list. The English sentence of Job 40:17 is what the reading relies on, and nothing in the answer depends on exactly how the tail moves.

So, is behemoth a dinosaur? Saying "it must be a dinosaur, because its tail is like a cedar" goes further than the text. Job 40:17 gives a likeness. It does not give a definition of a dinosaur, measurements, or a match that only a dinosaur could meet, and the rest of the description has to fit as well. Saying "it cannot be a dinosaur, because it has a different name or because the passage uses comparisons" also goes further than the text. Nothing in it says so. Showing that one argument fails does not prove some other animal either. No other species is named by this reading.

The LORD goes on to a second creature:

The description includes scales like armour, fire and smoke, weapons that cannot hold against it, churning of the deep sea, and rule over all that is proud. An identification based on the scales alone leaves too much of the passage unexplained. Whatever leviathan is said to be, the fire and the activity in the sea must still be accounted for. The reading also had no outside facts about what dinosaurs could or could not do, so these details cannot be used to prove a dinosaur or to rule one out.

The fire. The flame belongs to the description and should not be dropped. Two ways of reading it were weighed.

The first takes the fire as physical. That keeps Job's words about fire and smoke as they stand. The Hebrew word for "flame" in Job 41:21 means a real fire elsewhere:

The second takes it as a vivid picture of terror and power. The same speech of God uses vivid language elsewhere:

Job 41:20 and 41:31 also describe leviathan through comparisons, "as out of a seething pot or caldron" and "like a pot". And very similar words are used in a song of deliverance about the LORD Himself, not about an animal:

Elsewhere Scripture joins fire to words and to judgment, and says so outright:

These passages share similar language with Job 41. They are not about the same subject. They do not make leviathan the LORD, they do not turn its flame into Jeremiah's words, and they do not prove that every mention of fire is a picture.

The same Hebrew word is also translated as a blade and as glittering, so the word on its own does not decide the matter either:

Other passages turned up by the searches were checked and are not the same thing as Job's creature:

• Eliphaz's speech in Job 15:30 is not the LORD's speech in Job 41.
• In Jeremiah 36, the scroll that was burned held words written from Jeremiah's mouth. No animal breathes fire there.
• The "mouth" in Daniel 3 is the mouth of a furnace.

The result: the flame is part of what Job 41 says and must stay in any account of leviathan. Whether it describes an ordinary physical process was not established. The physical reading keeps Job's fire statements, and the vivid reading draws support from the comparisons and parallels above. Neither reading allows the flame to be deleted. Neither one, on its own, proves or rules out a dinosaur. So this answer does not claim a fire-breathing dinosaur has been shown. It also does not rule out a dinosaur on the strength of an outside claim about fire.

Leviathan is named in three other places:

Psalms 104 is praise for creation, and it places a leviathan that God made in the sea. Psalms 74 is a prayer during attacks by enemies and the ruin of the sanctuary, and it calls to mind God's past victories. Isaiah 27 speaks of judgment and of God's people being gathered in. The same Hebrew word appears once more, in Job 3:8, where it is translated "mourning". That chapter is Job's lament, and it describes no animal.

Because these passages share a word, they are rightly read side by side. That does not prove they all speak of the same single creature, the same event, or the same species.

Two claims about leviathan that the text does not support:

• "Leviathan is never something God made in the sea." This is ruled out. Psalms 104:26 says the opposite.
• "Every leviathan is the Devil." This is unsupported. Nothing ties every use of leviathan to the Devil. Revelation explains its own dragon, and that explanation cannot be carried over to passages it does not explain. To be fair, Psalms 104:26 saying God made leviathan does not disprove this view by itself either. The reading corrected an earlier overstatement on exactly this point.

The word "dragon" is not one fixed label for a single animal, and certainly not for dinosaurs. What a dragon refers to has to be learned from each passage. Sometimes Scripture itself says who the dragon is:

Rulers are also compared to dragons and whales:

So the idea that every dragon in the Bible is a report of a dinosaur is ruled out. It would throw away what Ezekiel 29:3, Revelation 12:9 and Revelation 20:2 themselves say the dragon is. Revelation's other dragon pictures (Revelation 12:3; 13:2; 16:13) belong to the same visions, and they were not used to classify any animal.

This works in one direction only. These verses explain these particular dragons. They do not turn every other dragon in Scripture into Pharaoh or the Devil, and they do not cancel creation passages like Genesis 1:21 or Psalms 104:26.

The same Hebrew word appears in many other settings, and they vary widely:

Here is what that range covers:

• In Exodus 7 the word is a serpent made from a rod.
• In Nehemiah 2 it is part of a place-name, and no animal is met there.
• In Deuteronomy 32 it is a comparison for poison.
• In Psalms 148 dragons are called to praise God along with the rest of creation.
• In Isaiah 13:22, 34:13 and 35:7, and in Jeremiah 9:11, 10:22, 49:33 and 51:37, dragons live in ruined or watered places, in passages about judgment and restoration.
• In Isaiah 43:20 they honour God for giving water.
• In Job 7:12, Job 30:29, Jeremiah 14:6 and Micah 1:8 they are comparisons, for something watched over, a lonely companion, sniffing the wind, and wailing.
• Psalms 44:19 and Psalms 91:13 speak of affliction and of deliverance from danger.
• Isaiah 51:9 recalls God's victory over "the dragon", together with drying up the sea for the redeemed to pass over (Isaiah 51:10).

The same word is also translated "whales" in Genesis 1:21 and "sea monsters" in Lamentations 4:3. These passages may well speak of real creatures, but none of them gives a way to tell whether a creature is a dinosaur. The word appearing in all these places does not make them all one species.

Daniel saw great beasts in visions, and the visions are explained in the text itself:

When Scripture explains a vision, that explanation comes first. So the idea that a strange or frightening beast in a vision must be a dinosaur is ruled out. These beasts stand for kings and kingdoms. This concerns what the pictures mean. It does not claim to say what animal shape lies behind each picture.

Searching by the kind of creature, not only by name, turned up more passages. Each was read in its setting:

Here is what each passage is doing:

• Isaiah 14 warns Palestina, using a picture of a root and its fruit.
• Isaiah 30 rebukes those who carried their riches through a dangerous land to Egypt for help that would not profit them.
• Lamentations 4 compares Zion's cruelty with sea creatures that still nurse their young. That detail about nursing belongs to the comparison and should not be dropped.
• Leviticus 11 is a law about clean and unclean creatures.
• Jonah tells of a fish God prepared, which swallowed Jonah and then released him.

The Hebrew word behind "fiery" in "fiery flying serpent" is also used for the serpents that bit Israel and for the seraphims in Isaiah's vision:

So that word alone does not name one kind of animal. None of these creatures was shown to be a dinosaur, and none was shown not to be. They are listed so that a search limited to behemoth is not passed off as the whole search.

The flood narrative speaks of all creatures together, and it includes both destruction and preservation:

To say that every creature was wiped out with no survivors leaves out "they that were with him in the ark" and the animals that came out of it. That reading is ruled out. If dinosaurs belong among these creatures, these general statements apply to them. But the flood account gives no list of which animals were on the ark and says nothing specific about dinosaurs. A story of dinosaurs dying out cannot be built from these general words alone.

In Job these creatures come up in God's challenge to Job, about Job's knowledge, his judgment of God, and his power (Job 38:4; 40:8). The LORD draws the point Himself: "None is so fierce that dare stir him up: who then is able to stand before me?" (Job 41:10). Job answers:

That purpose does not cancel the descriptions of the creatures. They are still descriptions of creatures God made. But the purpose is not to classify animals scientifically either. However leviathan is understood, the lesson stands: if Job cannot stand before this creature, he cannot stand before the God who made it.

This reading used Scripture alone. It used no outside definition of "dinosaur", and no anatomy, fossils, scientific classification, dates of extinction, age of the earth, or lists of animals on the ark. Scripture itself gives no list of features for "dinosaur", because it does not use the word. So there was nothing to measure behemoth or leviathan against.

That is why the identification remains unestablished:

• If the animals meant by "dinosaur" include the creature Job describes, then that description speaks of such an animal.
• If that creature belongs to some other group, then that passage does not describe a dinosaur.

Either way, Genesis 1:21 and 1:25 still teach that God made all such creatures. That part of the answer does not change.

This is a limit of what this reading could decide. It is not a claim that Scripture forbids the identification, and not a claim that Scripture guarantees it. It is also not a claim that Scripture denies such animals existed.

Every verse quoted here was taken from the King James text and read in its chapter. The searches included:

• the words "dinosaur" and "dinosaurs" (no matches), "monster" (no matches) and "monsters" (Lamentations 4:3);
• "behemoth", "leviathan", "whales", "beast of the earth", "great beasts", "flying serpent", "lizard", "great fish" and "creeping thing";
• every verse indexed under the Hebrew and Greek words for "dragon" (40 verses);
• every use of the original words for behemoth, leviathan, tail, flying serpent, lizard and flame;
• descriptive phrases such as "tail" with "cedar", "bones" with "iron", "breath" with "flame", "smoke" with "nostrils", and "fire" with "mouth".

Every match from these searches was read.

Some matches from three broader word searches were not opened: 125 references in all, for "cedar", the word translated "moveth", and the English word "flame". So no claim is made here about every cedar comparison or every use of those words. The answer above does not depend on any such claim. The whole Bible was not read through for this question.

During the final check, one transcription error in a supporting verse (Jonah 1:14) was found and corrected. That verse is not quoted here. Every verse quotation in the reading was then compared again with the text, and all of them matched.