Are you serious? How can describing creating and ruling over mythical beasts demonstrate God's power and wisdom? Might as well argue "Behold now the Centaur, which I made with thee..." And since this sppdly mythical beast was made with Job, you might as well go all the way and argue that Job was mythical.
Young Earth Creationists speculate that Behemoth was a sauropod (a long-necked dinosaur such as Brachiosaurus or Apatosaurus).
You mean some YECs, may be, as citation needed, while others argue simply for large animal (see https://creation.com/could-behemoth-have-been-a-dinosaur).
Let’s look at verse 16 in its entirety: He moveth his tail like a cedar: the sinews of his stones are wrapped together. The very peculiar verb move actually indicates “to extend;”
Another misleading argument, for many words have shades of meaning, and extend is guesswork. Here is a extended discussion on it.
This is simply as fallacious as liberal RC scholarship which effectively has Christ referring to a fable by invoking the story of Jonah.
I said no such thing, so not sure where you got that. Jonah is not a parable, though Christ did speak in parables. And that’s okay, because trying to figure out whether or not the story of the prodigal son is factual history would be kind of missing the point, don’t you think?
How can describing creating and ruling over mythical beasts demonstrate God’s power and wisdom? Might as well argue “Behold now the Centaur, which I made with thee…”
You’re approaching what I said with a false philosophical presupposition, then getting angry before even considering the point. You assume “mythical” automatically means “not real.” Symbolism shouldn’t be discounted, especially considering the important role it plays in ancient writings. We don’t use it as often today so it’s harder for modern readers to wrap their minds around, but it was so common in the ancient world we should be surprised if it didn’t appear in the Bible.
Other ancient symbols are also represented in the Bible. Like the aforementioned gods of Egypt and Canaan, God also mentions astrological constellations like Orion. Is this an endorsement of astrology? Hardly; it’s clearly meant to communicate a message ancient man would have understood.
So if God did mention a centaur, then I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a historical contextual reason for doing so (as there is in Job).
Despite the ad hominem attacks, you didn’t actually disprove my point. Here’s an example of what I mean:
Another misleading argument, for many words have shades of meaning, and extend is guesswork. Here is a extended discussion of it.
The link you provided contains some colossal ignorance, but I’ll deal with that in a minute. Your cut-off point (“extend”) is very interesting. I actually didn’t go as far into this, but the link confirmed what I had researched: the tail moves with an implication of pleasure. From there, he didn’t address any of my other points about the original Hebrew meaning. The verb is referring to an erection of the creature’s ding dong! The following reference to its “stones” (bahad) is to its testicles! The article danced around that and spent the rest of its time obsessing over how hippos and elephants don’t have “tails like cedars.” But the reference is clearly to its penis!
The Hebraic phrasing, as well as the external cross-cultural evidence, supports strongly that the behemoth is an ox deity of fertility, like Molech or Hathor, meant to represent the virility (untameability) of the animal kingdom. When compared to the Ugaric texts, it’s clear this poetic passage is written in dyambic verse- that is, in ancient literature, cow-gods and dragons of chaos (Leviathan) are paired together.
and which makes relegating Behemoth (“which I made with thee”) and Leviathan to be mythical beasts absurd,
The Leviathan, which I’ll get into next week, is described as a fire-breathing serpent and in other Bible verses having several heads. Of course this isn’t a real animal! I argue that it’s actually supposed to symbolize Satan, who in later passages (like Revelation) also is a fire-breathing multi-headed dragon. Unless you think that’s not symbolic either, and that an actual giant woman is in outer space giving birth to a baby that a cosmic dragon is waiting to devour….
And whether you like it or not, sometimes your articles come across as being the product of an elitist who seeks to make a name for himself
I find these accusations interesting, though usually not specific enough. By “blog pimp,” are you accusing me of seeking financial gain? I’ll be real with you; I don’t do ads or anything, and make no money from my blog (Jesus didn’t charge people for the Word). I garner about 250 unique site visits every day. When I post one on FR, that might lead to an extra 100 clicks or so. But so what? Do you have any idea the punishment I get in exchange for that 350 clicks? Whatever reward there is (none) is outweighed by the withering criticisms that fuel my own insecurities. Have you been there with me praying for strength to overcome my fear of criticism? Or when I lay awake at night obsessing over getting one little tiny thing wrong, and utter humiliation I feel when some smart aleck points it out?
And it’s made me far more enemies than friends. A sane person would have stopped doing this a long time ago.
…by engaging in dubious corrections, as in His Hand is Stretched Out Still
I’ve excoriated myself over that blog far more than you could ever excoriate me. I wish I could delete it from ever existing. But failure is our greatest teacher, and that brings me to the idiocy on the Creation link you posted to me:
Think of this blog as the opposite of that one. Then, I was so caught up in the emotional excitement of my point, it clouded my better judgment. I didn’t rationally study the commentaries enough.
Now this is the opposite. I would love it if dinosaurs were in the Bible. But no rational take on the Bible can support that. So let me unpack something in the link:
There are basically three animals that have been put forward as candidates for Behemoth which we will consider in this paper: the elephant, the hippopotamus, and some type of dinosaur.
To flip your quote back on you, Are you serious?
Who was it that deemed a Behemoth could only be one of those three? That’s such a gigantic leap of logic, you’ll break every bone in your body upon impact! Has this author never heard of a peraceratherium? Or a mastodon? Or a woolly mammoth? Or any other extinct species waaay bigger than any terrestrial mammal today?
First off, this seems to presuppose that the Behemoth is “the largest animal that ever lived” (the Bible doesn’t say that), then embarks on a ridiculous narrowing-down. But this genius apparently knows nothing about sauropods. The clichéd depiction of solitary long-necked creatures living in the “jungles and ferns” is outdated by about 50 years. The fossil record clearly shows that sauropods were pack animals that migrated across long plains, like bison today, as is the biological niche large herbivores fill.
For that matter, Young Earth Creationism is too guilty of leaving out too many extinct animals we know existed. To try to reduce how many species could be confined to Noah’s ark, the Creation Museum or Ark Encounter only depict dinosaurs most famous in pop culture: T-Rex, brachiosaurus, velociraptors. This smacks of cynicism: where are the thousands of other lesser-known species like tarbosaurus, yutyrannus, or Dakota raptor? And why just dinosaurs? What about all the other bizarre prehistoric beasts? The Ice Age mammals? (The dirty secret here is that so many terrestrial animals have been found in the fossil record, they couldn’t have possibly lived at the same time and been on Noah’s Ark; you would need thousands of arks to hold two of each of all their species!)
Let’s be real, daniel. Young Earth Creationists read about the behemoth in Job 40 and imagine they’re reading about a dinosaur, then get emotionally protective of that hallucination because of how it makes them feel. As evidence that they’re using the emotional part of their brain (the amygdala) instead of the logical part (the frontal cortex), I’ve observed the hostility and aggression they react with when you point out the real meaning of this passage.
To be frank, this kind of willful ignorance of paleontology and biology makes Young Earth Creationism an embarrassment to Christianity!
Oh, and happy Easter.