I hadnt seen this article before and i dont know whether or not its already posted on Biologos.
Caveat…im not posting this as some kind of support for YECism or to discredit Naturalism…this is purely a supporting evidence for the biblical narrative of the Behemoth.
Im not suprised by the story as its evidence that humans have known about and taken an interest in, dinosaurs for almost all of documented human history which is entirely consistent with the biblical narrative.
In other sites located in the state of Utah (United States), petroglyphs and fossilized footprints also coexist, even though to a lesser extent. These sites include Poison Spider Dinosaur Tracks, Parowan Gap, and Zion National Park7. Regardless, in none of these instances do the petroglyphs display such a close-knit relationship with the footprints as in Serrote do Letreiro, where it is unquestionable that the engravers acknowledged the footprints and intentionally executed the petroglyphs around them, establishing a symbolic connection between human graphic expression and the fossil record
How do you know the behemoth was not just a well known mythical creature like the leviathan was? Seems that their imaginations worked just as good, or even better, with story telling then as they do now.
I kind of feel like it would be if in 200k years aliens visited earth and someone said look at their stories from the 1950s they mention us.
Not sure how fossil footprints near Native American petrographs support an assertion that the dinosaurs and people lived together. I would assume the petrographs are drawn on cliff walls above where the tracks are found, having been eroded to the surface in a deeper layer than the walls, which were deposited then eroded to a cliff wall before people showed up. The people probably saw the tracks there and attached some special significance to them, leading the people to draw pictures at that site.
I’ve mentioned this before, but I wonder if the Psalmist had heard of the exposed fossils in the Valley of the Whales in Egypt, and and was inspired to write the following Psalm. We will never know, but the imagery is strange if there were not something in his experience to inspire it. The Psalm is sometimes interpreted as representing Pharaoh’s army laid waste behind the exodus in the Red Sea, but then fed to the desert animals?
Psalm 74
12 God my King is from ancient times,
performing saving acts on the earth.
13 You divided the sea with Your strength;
You smashed the heads of the sea monsters in the waters;
14 You crushed the heads of Leviathan;
You fed him to the creatures of the desert.
Does a hippo have a tail like a cedar? Behemoth is a description of a dinosaur, from digging up dinosaur bones and describing what they were like. Just as we do today.
Job 40:15-18
Behold now behemoth, which I made with thee; he eateth grass as an ox.
Lo now, his strength is in his loins, and his force is in the navel of his belly.
He moveth his tail like a cedar: the sinews of his stones are wrapped together.
His bones are as strong pieces of brass; his bones are like bars of iron.
A Brontosaurus would be my guess … if they hadn’t died out before humans were created, unless one or more of them survived until, what?, the Flood and was too big to get on Noah’s Ark.
It is the original Hebrew that is inspired and Strong’s concordance is just an interpretation. Brontosaurus is a very good description with a large tail and eating grass (herbivore).
a Diplodocus or Brachiosaurus, exact meaning unknown
Some translate as elephant or hippopotamus but from the description in Job 40:15-24, this is patently absurd
Hunker down. The OP was posted by a Seventh Day Adventist Young Earth Creationist. They don’t take well to claims to an Earth older than 6,000 or 10,000 years.
Many ancient human groups were dependent on food they could track and hunt. That gave them good basic skills to sketch an animal based on bones or tracks. Some dinosaurs were larger than all animals living in the surroundings of humans. It is obvious that the large bones or fossilized tracks were noted and sources of many wild stories. For example, the stories of dragons probably originated from the huge skeletons of dinosaurs - the fossilized bones were evidence of such great beasts.
I agree that human knowledge of dragon-sized (or Leviathan-sized) great beasts is ancient, despite the fact that most dinosaurs died long before the emergence of humans. The small dinosaurs that lived after humans emerged were given another name - birds.
OK so I’ve skimmed the paper in Scientific Reports. It tells us that there are both dinosaur tracks and petroglyphs in the formation and acknowledges that whoever created the petroglyphs seems to have attached some sort of significance to the footprints.
But—and it is a big but—it doesn’t tell us what that significance was.
There is no indication whatsoever that the creators of the petroglyphs identified the tracks with any specific kid of creature that they had actually seen alive, let alone theropod or sauropod dinosaurs. In fact there is no indication whatsoever that they even identified them with any kind of creature at all.
In terms of evidence that dinosaurs and humans coexisted, this provides us with nothing. Nichts. Nada. Diddly squat. Bupkis.
Those verses seem to be describing mammal features. For those of us who grew up on farms around cattle, we know what stones they are talking about. “Swinging like a cedar” could be a reference to the other part of the wedding tackle. Also echoed by “his force is in the navel of his belly”. A google search should turn up some material on these possible euphemisms.
That’s a new perspective. Either way we did not coexist with dinosaurs… at least not in our current form. We were sitting up in the cedar like a tarsier.
It has been around awhile. Also note that many translations say “He stiffens his tail like a cedar,” ESV, CSV and others. That gives a bit different imagery as well.
The Egyptian connection is pure speculation for which no evidence has ever been found. On the other hand, the description in Job sounds like a giant ox.
There’s a good chance the comparison with a ceder is about the sound this giant tail would make when moved, like a mega-swish.
Creatures born from eggs don’t have navels – thus this is not a dinosaur, if “navel” is correct.
Interesting. The root of the verb has a meaning that covers pleasure, delight, desire . . . not sure how they’re getting either “moves” or “stiffens”.
Job 40:15 says the Behemoth eats grass like an ox. So it can’t be an ox.
Navel is poetic license. Hebrew “beten” means belly. (If is often translated “womb” in the context of pregnancy.) Not that I think it is a reptile haha.
Behemoth is a description of a dinosaur, from digging up dinosaur bones and describing what they were like. Just as we do today.
That’s a new perspective. Either way we did not coexist with dinosaurs… at least not in our current form. We were sitting up in the cedar like a tarsier.
