What's your favorite part of the Bible? If you answered "the talking donkey" or "all
the dragons that are flying around," then have we got the list for you!
These are the craziest creatures described in the Bible.
It's somewhat common knowledge that angels depicted as white ladies with
wings actually don't appear anywhere in the Bible. In that sense, angels are more
of a culturally accepted shorthand rather than a straightforward adaptation of the source material.
So why have artists across the centuries decided to depict these heavenly hosts as white-garbed
blonde women as opposed to how they were described in the text? It's probably because Biblical angels
would've been harder to draw on church ceilings and because they're also kind of frightening.
"The horror. The horror."
Consider the Ophanim, first described in Ezekiel chapter 1, verse 15. In Jewish tradition,
there are ten orders of angels, and the Ophanim are considered some of the holiest.
There's a lot that you can get into about them, and parts of the description sound
a bit like a fever dream. For now, suffice it to say that Ophanim are
essentially flaming gyroscopes covered in eyes, guarding God's seat of power.
The Behemoth is one of a handful of creatures in the Bible that historians have been arguing about
for quite a while. Scholars can't agree on much in this case, but they do know two things for sure:
the Behemoth was big, and he had a belly button. The Book of Job describes the Behemoth as a giant,
reed-dwelling creature that's too powerful for anyone except God to control.
Depending on the interpretation, it could drink an entire river,
and its strength was significant enough to merit mentioning four times in a single paragraph.
Besides "big" and "strong," the closest thing we get to a descriptor is a line about how
"his force is in the navel of his belly. So whatever Job was describing, it probably wasn't
a dinosaur, considering that animals that hatch from eggs are usually short on navels.
So what then could the Behemoth have been?
Most modern literal interpretations point to either a hippo or an elephant,
but there's also some debate as to whether it was just a metaphor for the power of God.
The second creature described in the Behemoth passage of Job is the Leviathan.
Where the Behemoth leaves quite a bit of wiggle room for visual interpretation,
the Leviathan is bizarrely fleshed out. Simply put, Job goes into staggering
detail describing all of the wildly upsetting aspects of this creature's body.
Whereas the Behemoth is considered "the Beast of the land," the Leviathan calls the water his
domain. It has double-thick armor plating running down its back and muscular folds
all over its body. It breathes fire, skin is impenetrable, tough as stone. It is,
in modern parlance, hardcore rock and roll. Its name is synonymous with the unknowable
and terrifying sea creatures that old sailors used to tell stories about. Cartographers marked
their maps with warnings of such dangers, such as the old chestnut "There be monsters here."
As with the Behemoth, the Leviathan has been the subject of plenty of debate over the years.
But unlike the Behemoth, the language used to describe the Leviathan
doesn't leave a lot of room for poetic license. While people have theorized
that it may have been a crocodile or a particularly crabby whale,
it's a little difficult to square that with the description of a fire breathing rock monster.
"Fire! Fire! Fire! Fire!"
If books of the Bible were kids in an eighth-grade class photo, the Book of Revelation would be the
one with too many safety pins in its sweatshirt and an X-Acto knife that it stole from art class.
That's plenty clear in the case of the descriptively named First Beast,
which is laid out for the reader in Revelation chapter 13, verse 1.
Also called the Beast of the Sea on account of its oceanic origin,
the First Beast sports a flirty summer look featuring ten horns with crowns on
top of them. "The name of blasphemy" is written across all seven of its heads,
and it also has the feet of a bear and the mouth of a lion. Furthermore, it's described as taking
a lethal beating to one of its heads before miraculously healing itself, which made it
quite the piece of fascination, as after that, quote, "all the world wondered at the beast."
The First Beast pops up again a few pages later in Revelation chapter 17, when an angel pops its
head in to explain that the creature was a metaphor for mountains, and also a metaphor
for kings. Understandably, the Book of Revelation has a reputation for being filled with metaphors.
"It's a metaphor, see?"
Next on our tour of mythological Bible creatures is the dragon. The King James
version of the Bible contains 34 different mentions of these beasts. Some are just
allusions lending themselves to colorful hyperbole, like when Deuteronomy notes that
"wine is the poison of dragons" or this poetic verse from Micah:
"Therefore I will wail and howl, I will go stripped and naked:
I will make a wailing like the dragons, and mourning as the owls."
And then there's the prophet Isaiah, who comes riding in with some literal monsters.
According to Chapter 13 of Isaiah, after Babylon falls, its palaces will be infested by dragons,
as well as "doleful creatures," owls, and satyrs. Dragons appear again in Chapter 34,
where they take up residence in another city that's smashed by the wrath of the Almighty.
Things get even more intense in the Book of Revelation, where Satan takes the form
of a great red dragon, fighting angels in a heavenly battle royale. In a stunning upset,
one particular angel banishes the creature to the bottomless pit for a thousand years.
It's worth noting that of the many uses of the word "dragon" in the King James Bible,
17 of them are derived from the Hebrew word "tanniyn" which is alternately translated as
"whale" in Genesis chapter 1, verse 21 and "sea monsters" in Lamentations chapter 4, verse 3.
So, in that sense, the word is a bit of catchall for a large and intimidating animal.
"Maps used to say there be dragons here. Now they don’t."
Yes, there are indeed unicorns mentioned in the Bible. Although, as is the case with several
of these animals, it kind of depends on which version of the Bible you read. When it comes to
translation, the Bible is funny. A lot of it has been interpreted and reinterpreted hundreds of
times in just about every language, even Klingon. Different societal situations at different
points in time have yielded wildly diverse understandings of what the original text meant,
with some words having more than one meaning and others having no direct translation at all.
Sometimes, translators just fill in the blanks however they can.
And that's one explanation for why the King James Bible, first printed in the early 17th century,
mentions unicorns not once but nine separate times. They're generally used as a point
of reference for a simile, but it's a little different in the Book of Isaiah. In Chapter 34,
God is cutting down sinners with a sword filled with blood and the kidneys of rams.
It's foretold that while this happens, unicorns and bulls
will overrun the land and lay the place to waste. Sounds both terrifying and sparkly.
You know a cherub when you see one. Unless, that is, you read the source material, in which case
they skew a little more toward terrifying chimera rather than lovable angel toddlers. As described
in the Book of Ezekiel, the cherubim are an angelic order with a lot going on physically.
They each have four faces, including that of a human, an ox, an eagle, and a lion. Additionally,
they each had four wings, as well as straight legs capped at the end with shiny bronze bull hooves.
They're traditionally given a series of heavenly duties,
perhaps most famously guarding the gates of Eden. In some traditional Jewish teachings, they're
considered the ninth highest order of angels, and associated with the task of helping people
move beyond their sins in order to be closer to God. And for fans of raiding lost things,
they're also what's described as being sculpted onto the lid of the Ark of the Covenant in Exodus.
As with lots of Biblical creatures, the cherubim have shifted visually over time.
As popular art has changed, they became thematically intermingled with the Greek and Roman
god of love and are now visually synonymous with the lovable winged babies we're all familiar with.
In Genesis, shortly after Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden of Eden,
people started getting on with the business of making more people. While a lot of that
went down about the way you'd expect, there were some glaring irregularities as well.
It was a hectic point in the Biblical timeline, and a lot of strangeness gets swept under the rug,
at least in terms of the things they teach in Sunday school.
Exhibit A in that regard: the Nephilim. In Genesis Chapter 6,
it's relayed that "the sons of God," usually interpreted as fallen angels,
noticed that the daughters of man were looking rather attractive. The angels got hitched
to human brides, and the resulting progeny were the Nephilim, a race of violent giants.
Just how giant is giant? In the Book of Numbers, they're described as being roughly to people
what people are to grasshoppers. In the Book of Enoch, an apocryphal religious text that didn't
make the final cut of the Bible, it's said that they were nearly a mile high. They're
also considered to have been symbolic of the corruption that God wiped out via the Great Flood.
There are two prominent talking animals in the Bible. The first is fairly well-known: In Genesis,
Eve is tempted by a snake with more interest in her nutritional intake than you tend to see
in a standard reptile. The second one you might not have heard of, and it gets a little strange.
In the Book of Numbers, we meet Balaam, a troubled prophet. Long story short, Balaam is on a road
trip, and he really had to convince God about it in order to get the Lord's permission to go.
God gives him the go-ahead but doesn't feel great about it, so he sends an angel to mess
with the donkey that Balaam is riding. The angel, who's invisible to Balaam, freaks the donkey out,
making it veer off course and smack Balaam against a wall. Balaam gets angry and smacks
the donkey around, and that's when God gives the animal the power of speech.
The donkey then asks Balaam why he was beating him so. So Balaam,
apparently unfazed that he's now in the presence of a talking animal, responds,
"You have made a fool of me! If only I had a sword in my hand, I would kill you right now."
At this point, the angel shows himself to Balaam and says that if the donkey
hadn't been pulling evasive maneuvers, the angel would've killed Balaam by now. Balaam repents,
goes about his business, and apparently never checks back
in on the development that he now owns a talking barnyard animal.
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