This is another instance where you should do RESEARCH before making such casual declarations. The theory that dragon stories were based on protoceratops does NOT claim that ancients saw live dinosaurs. They found fossil remains and were smart enough to realize, “Look at the size of this dragon’s skeleton!”
If you had read carefully, you wouldn’t have made this unnecessary mistake in basic reading comprehension.
So you’re suggesting that God is giving Job a vision of a prehistoric beast when talking about Leviathan? Describing something he would only know from fossils, if at all?
That is possible but why describe it as if Job could ACTUALLY throw spears at it or try to catch it? Of course he wouldn’t be able to. The thing has been dead for Millions of years. It seems redundant to ask him if he can do those things.
Also not sure where you get Protoceratops from. As I understand it, the Protoceratops was a very small creature that often fought with the also very small Velociraptor.
Sorry. That doesn’t make sense to me. Are you saying that the authors of the scriptures ONLY referred to creatures which actually existed? Do you believe that God never gave anyone visions of symbolic creatures? (You must find the Book of Revelation totally baffling in that particular regard.)
As to leviathan, I suggest you consult some good commentaries and familiarize yourself with the possible meanings of the word and why it was used.
As to your complaints about Protoceratops, it sounds like you are unfamiliar with a basic principle of folklore: You may know it in modern terms as “the fish gets larger each time it is described.” Thus, dragons had a way of growing larger as stories were retold. Also, the protoceratops had a disproportionately large head and so when found in isolation, the head was often assumed to be part of a MUCH larger beast. Also, I chose to mention Protoceratops for two reasons:
Protoceratops is considered by many scholars to be the inspiration for, at the very least, the smaller dragons of mythology (similar to those imagined) within the Game of Thrones franchise) and the griffons which decorated many building projects of Europe.
I nearly used a higher taxonomic term but I thought the suborder term CERATOPSIAN might be too technical to be familiar to all readers. But if you prefer my saying, “Ceratopsian fossils probably inspired legends of dragons, both small dragons and large dragons”, that statement would have covered the gamut from the smaller Protoceratops to the larger Triceratops and all sorts of other beasts of that larger suborder of creatures.
@Find_My_Way, I welcome you to the forum and hope you find participation here productive. However, if you are going to be combative and resistive of having these fundamentals explained for you, I won’t be replying to your posts any further. I don’t get paid to tutor. So if you don’t like the information presented, you may certainly ignore them. But if you complain about them simply because you find that they threaten some tradition or worldview you believe is endangered by these facts, I have no reason to bother explaining what you are misunderstanding, as in this case. (If you don’t think BEHEMOTH and LEVIATHAN are understood accurately by contemporary scholars, that’s your right. But if you are simply going to mock and whine about the information, I won’t be engaging your comments any further. The choice is yours. How about we each be cordial and share knowledge respectfully and mutually? I hope we can agree to do that. I concede that you have often tested boundaries here and my post betrayed my running out of patience with some of your posts but I’m hoping we can have a productive dialogue and both extend extra grace in terms of maximum conviviality. I share a high view of scripture but I don’t have a lot of patience for “If you believe X, then why not throw out the Bible completely” when it doesn’t make sense.)
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