No matter what you're looking for, you can probably find it in the Bible.
Many people are familiar with the more popular Bible animals, like Jonah's whale and the
menagerie on Noah's ark.
But there are lots of other weird creatures in the Bible that you might not have covered
in Sunday School.
It's sort of common knowledge at this point that those white-lady-with-wings angels that
we all grew up with don't appear anywhere in the Bible.
Angels are more of a culturally accepted shorthand than a straightforward adaptation of the source
material.
So why did artists across the centuries decide to depict the heavenly host as white-garbed,
blonde-haired bird women and not the way they were described in the text?
Probably because if you saw pictures of what angels were supposed to look like, they'd
haunt your nightmares.
In Jewish tradition, there are ten orders of angels, and the Ophanim are considered
some of the most holy.
There's a lot to go into, and parts of the description come off a little like a fever
dream, but essentially Ophanim are flaming gyroscopes covered in eyes, guarding God's
seat of power.
That's a little harder to paint on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
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 about this puppy, but they know two things: He was big, and
he had a belly button.
The Book of Job describes 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 be worth mentioning four times in a single paragraph.
But besides "big" and "strong," the closest thing we get to a descriptor is a line about
how, quote, "his force is in the navel of his belly."
So aside from the superpowered belly button thing, what 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, and where
the Behemoth leaves quite a bit of wiggle room for visual interpretation, the Leviathan
is bizarrely well fleshed out, to the point of making the Behemoth seem like an unloved
afterthought.
No, really.
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.
Its skin is impenetrable, tough as stone.
It honestly reads more like a description of Godzilla than a Sunday school story.
As with the Behemoth, the Leviathan has been the subject of plenty of debate over the years.
Unlike the Behemoth, however, the language used to describe it doesn't leave a lot of
room for poetic license.
While people have theorized that it may have been a crocodile or a particularly weird whale,
it's a little difficult to square that with "fire breathing rock monster."
The descriptively named First Beast is laid out for the reader in Revelation 13:1.
Also called the Beast of the Sea on account of its oceanic point of origin, it sports
ten horns with crowns on top of them, "the name of blasphemy" written across all seven
of its heads, the feet of a bear, and the mouth of a lion.
It's also described as taking a lethal beating to one of its heads before miraculously healing
itself.
The First Beast shows up again a few pages later in Revelation 17 when an angel pops
its head in to explain that the creature was a metaphor for mountains, and also a metaphor
for kings, and also...well, Revelation has never been the easiest nut to crack, you know?
Revelation's Second Beast is a mysterious son of a gun.
Introduced at roughly the same time as Beast Number 1, this shady fella emerges from the
Earth in what you have to assume is a pretty dramatic spectacle.
It has the voice of a dragon and the horns of … a lamb?
Huh.
The Second Beast acts as sort of a hype man for the First Beast.
In Revelation 13, it's seen convincing human beings to worship the First Beast, pulling
stunts like making the sky rain fire.
It also has the dubious honor of branding the hands or foreheads of its followers with
the "mark of the beast," an enigmatic physical sign indicating fealty to the forces of darkness.
There's no mention of whether or not this is its way of compensating for its only remarkable
feature being a pair of lamb horns, which rank pretty low in terms of intimidation factor
on the list of possible horns to have.
[just some sheep laughing]
The King James Bible includes a staggering 34 different mentions of dragons, which is
pretty undoubtedly a matter of creative translation.
Some are just allusions lending themselves to colorful hyperbole, like when Deuteronomy
says that "wine is the poison of dragons."
But Isaiah comes riding in with some literal monsters to slay.
According to Chapter 13 of Isaiah, after Babylon falls, its palaces will be infested by dragons,
as well as satyrs and, oddly enough, owls.
"What's going on here?"
"We're owl exterminators."
"Oh? Then you won't have any problem...
exterminating this owl!"
Dragons appear again in Chapter 34, where they take up residence in another city that's
Hulk-smashed by the wrath of the Almighty.
Things get even more intense in Revelation, as they tend to do.
There we see that Satan takes the form of a great red dragon, fighting angels in a heavenly
battle royale.
In a stunning upset, one particular angel lays on a smackdown and banishes the creature
to the bottomless pit for a thousand years.
It's worth noting that of the many uses of "dragon" in the King James Bible, 17 are derived
from a Hebrew word which is alternately translated as "whale" in Genesis 1:21 and "sea monsters"
in Lamentations 4:3, making it kind of a catch-all for "big, scary animal."
Rounding out the list of Bible animals that seem more at home in a D&D campaign than in
scripture is the cockatrice.
It shows up three times in the King James translation of the Book of Isaiah, generally
in foreboding passages and descriptions of the works of evil men, all of which leads
to one important question: What is a cockatrice?
For the benefit of the more outdoorsy kids in the crowd, a cockatrice was a mythological
creature that was a lot more popular in the Middle Ages than it is these days.
It was a sort of low-key dragon; a winged, two-legged serpent with a rooster's head.
As fun as it is to imagine weird chicken snakes on Noah's ark, all signs point to the inclusion
of the cockatrice being a strangeness particular to medieval translations.
While the King James Bible brings it up, other versions have a killjoy habit of interpreting
the Hebrew root word as "adder" or "viper."
In a twist that will come as a shock to nobody at this point, yes, there are unicorns mentioned
in the Bible.
It just sort of depends on which Bible you read.
See, the Bible is funny.
A lot of it has been interpreted and reinterpreted hundreds of times in just about every language.
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, blanks needed to be filled in.
And that's one explanation for why the King James Bible, first printed in the early 17th
century, mentions unicorns not once but a whopping nine separate times.
They're generally used as a point of reference or a metaphor, but all that changes in the
Book of Isaiah.
In Chapter 34, God is on a hot streak, cutting down sinners with a sword filled with blood
and ram kidneys.
It's foretold that while this happens, unicorns and bulls will overrun the land and lay the
place to waste.
"Oh my God.”
Everybody knows a cherub when they see one.
They're the pudgy, loveable Cupids sprinkled around staff rooms in confetti form around
mid-February every year, shooting love arrows into the hearts of even the most stalwart
bachelors.
Unless, that is, you read the source material, in which case they skew a little more toward
terrifying chimera than pinchable angel toddlers.
As described in Ezekiel, the cherubim are an angelic order with a lot going on, physically.
They each have four faces, for starters, including an eagle, a lion, an ox, and a human.
Each one of them had four wings, too, as well as straight legs capped at the end with shiny
bronze bull hooves.
They're traditionally given a series of heavenly duties, maybe most famously guarding the gates
of Eden.
In some traditional 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 changed, they became thematically intermingled with the Greek/Roman god of love,
Cupid or Eros, and are now visually synonymous with the lovable winged babies we're all familiar
with.
In Genesis, shortly after Adam and Eve were eighty-sixed 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 ever so slightly
swept under the rug, at least in terms of the things they teach in Sunday School.
Exhibit A: The Nephilim.
In Genesis Chapter 6, it's relayed that "the sons of God," usually interpreted as fallen
angels, noticed that the human ladies were looking pretty all right.
The angels got hitched to human brides, and the resulting progeny were the Nephilim, a
race of violent giants.
How giant is giant?
In Numbers they're described as being roughly to people what people are to grasshoppers.
So, you know.
Big.
The Book of Enoch, an apocryphal religious text that didn't make the final cut of the
Bible, said they were nearly a mile high.
They're also considered to have been symbolic of the corruption God felt he needed to wipe
out with the Great Flood.
Wait a minute, talking animals?
"...No."
"Yes."
There are two prominent talking animals in the canonical Bible.
The first is a gimme: 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 is a little more obscure, but just as strange.
In Numbers, we meet Balaam, a troubled prophet.
Long story short, Balaam is on a road trip, but God doesn't feel great about it, so he
sends an angel to mess with the donkey Balaam is riding.
The angel, invisible to Balaam, freaks the donkey out, making it veer off course and
smack Balaam against a wall.
Balaam gets angry at the donkey and smacks it around.
That happens a few times, and then God gives the donkey the power of speech.
"Are you talking to...me?"
After he and the donkey chat for awhile, the angel shows himself to Balaam and says that
if the donkey hadn't been dodging him, the angel would've killed Balaam by now.
Balaam repents, goes about his business, and apparently never checks back in on the whole
"I own a talking barnyard animal" development.
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