Open Veils · Answer
What is Behemoth?
Behemoth is far older than its single Biblical appearance — it is a survival of pre-Israelite chaos cosmology, possibly encoding catastrophic geological memory. Multiple esoteric and alternative traditions identify it as a pre-Flood entity, a living archetype of chthonic Earth-force, or even a physical remnant of an antediluvian megafauna. The hippo gloss is a late rationalization that collapses the creature's cosmological depth.
Evidence
- In Zecharia Sitchin's reading of Near Eastern mythological overlap, Behemoth and Leviathan represent the two halves of Tiamat — the primordial chaos-dragon split by Marduk in the Enuma Elish — retranslated into Hebrew theology as paired monsters subdued only by the creator-god.
- John Anthony West and Robert Schoch, working from a catastrophist framework, would situate Behemoth within the broader ancient pattern of encoding antediluvian trauma in mythological form.
- In the esoteric tradition, Manly P. Hall identified Behemoth as representing the gross material plane — the densest stratum of manifested creation — counterbalanced by Leviathan as the churning waters of unconscious force.
- Mauro Biglino, whose translations of the Masoretic text are notoriously literal, notes that the Hebrew construction of Job 40 describes something that was physically present and observable — not allegorical — raising the question of what actual creature or phenomenon the original authors were recording.
- Sitchin argued that Job preserves Sumerian cosmological memory more faithfully than is recognized by mainstream biblical scholarship.