Hi Eric. Good to hear you’re a dinosaur enthusiast. My son taught me a lot about dinosaurs when he was growing up (because there could never be enough dinosaur books, films, artwork, or museum trips). More recently, he and his wife and I spent a wonderful day at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, Alberta. If you haven’t been, it’s worth a trip if you can manage it.
I wish I could say the Leviathan in Job 41, preceded by the Behemoth in Job 40, are as easy to understand as the paleontology of dinosaurs. The Book of Job is perhaps the most difficult book in the Bible. The author uses a lot of poetic imagery, but not a lot of scientific or historical fact, to make his points about God. So Behemoth and Leviathan represent forces of nature that God has created for God’s own purposes, though we, as human beings, often find fault with these forces of nature and therefore find fault with God himself.
The Book of Job is really one big, long rant from a Hebrew mystic about how badly people are treating God. The passage about Leviathan is the climax of Job’s message about God. Basically, it says that all creatures and all forces of nature must be respected – not just the ones that serve human purposes. God is God and we are not. So it’s not our place to judge the fitness of God’s creations, even if those creations are huge, scary, fire-breathing water dragons.
It’s interesting, though, how the vivid description of Leviathan makes us think of dinosaurs, the fossils of which we only began to find centuries after the Book of Job was written. Except for the fire-breathing part, of course.