What about dinosaurs?

Question 60004.

Looking for dinosaurs in Scripture is one of the first things a curious child does once they discover that the Bible starts with animals and that their favourite creature seems to be missing. It is a fair question, and it deserves better than a nervous change of subject.

The short answer is that the word dinosaur appears nowhere in the Bible, for the excellent reason that it was invented in 1841 by Richard Owen, more than two centuries after the King James translators finished work. The creatures are another matter.

Did they exist at all?

Yes, and I want to say that plainly because some believers assume that questioning the timescale means questioning the fossils. The bones are real, they are found across every continent, and the creatures they belonged to were extraordinary.

That is exactly what you would expect from Genesis. God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds, and He filled the seas with great creatures. A world made by a Creator who delights in variety is precisely the sort of world that would contain a fifteen metre reptile with a tail like a battering ram.

So the search for dinosaurs in Scripture is not an attempt to explain away inconvenient bones. It is an attempt to work out where these animals fit in the account we already have.

When were they made?

On the young earth reading I hold, land animals were created on day six, alongside Adam. Sea creatures and flying creatures came on day five. That places these animals in the same week as humanity rather than sixty five million years before it.

That is the sharpest difference between the biblical account and the standard museum caption, which has them separated by an unimaginable gap. Everything about how you read dinosaurs in Scripture follows from which chronology you accept, and I set out my reasoning in the article on the age of the earth.

It also means they were originally plant eaters, since God gives every green plant for food to every beast of the earth in Genesis 1:30. Teeth are tools rather than diet charts, and there are creatures alive today with formidable dentition that eat fruit.

Behemoth in Job

The best candidate for dinosaurs in Scripture is the creature God describes to Job in chapter 40. The Hebrew is behemoth, and God calls it the first of His works.

The description is specific. It eats grass like an ox, its strength is in its loins, and the muscles of its belly are like bronze. Then comes the line that has puzzled translators for centuries, that it makes its tail stiff like a cedar, Job 40:17.

Study Bibles usually suggest the hippopotamus or the elephant. Neither has a tail remotely like a cedar, and I have never found that identification convincing. A large sauropod fits the description as it stands, and the whole point of the speech is that God is describing a creature Job could recognise.

Leviathan

Job 41 gives an entire chapter to leviathan, a creature of the water with scales that cannot be pierced, teeth that terrify, and a temperament that makes weapons useless. Psalm 104 places it in the sea, and Isaiah uses it as an image of a great enemy.

The description includes language about smoke from its nostrils and flames going out of its mouth. Many readers assume that is poetic exaggeration, and it may be, though the bombardier beetle should make us slower to say a chemical defence is impossible.

Whatever leviathan was, the passage assumes a real animal that Job knew about. That is the important point when weighing dinosaurs in Scripture. God is not inventing monsters to make a rhetorical point. He is pointing at creation and asking Job whether he made any of it.

Other traces of dinosaurs in Scripture

The Hebrew tannin appears around thirty times, translated variously as sea monster, serpent, dragon or jackal depending on context. It covers Genesis 1:21, the great creatures God created, and turns up again in the prophets.

That breadth means the word cannot simply be read as dinosaur wherever it appears, and I would be misleading you if I pretended otherwise. Hebrew zoology was not organised by our categories, and a word can cover a range of large and dangerous creatures.

The wider question of dragon accounts across cultures is worth its own treatment, and I take it up in whether there have ever been dragons.

Were they on the ark?

Genesis says two of every kind of land animal came to Noah. If these creatures were land animals of their kinds, they were represented, and there is no exception clause.

The obvious objection is size, and it dissolves on inspection. God did not need adult specimens. A juvenile sauropod is the size of a large dog, most kinds were considerably smaller than the famous ones, and the ark was an enormous vessel with a volume comparable to several hundred railway wagons.

This is one of those places where dinosaurs in Scripture stop being a problem and start being an argument, since the numbers work out far more comfortably than the objection assumes.

What happened to them?

The world after the flood was not the world before it. Climate, atmosphere and vegetation all changed, and the animals that emerged from the ark repopulated an environment far harsher than the one their ancestors knew.

Large creatures with slow reproduction and heavy food requirements are always the first to fail under such pressure. Add human hunting, since men have always killed what frightens them, and the disappearance of these animals over the following centuries needs no special explanation.

Extinction, incidentally, is not a problem for the biblical account. Species have been disappearing throughout recorded history, and the disappearance of the creatures we call dinosaurs is a difference of scale rather than of kind.

The soft tissue question

In 2005 Mary Schweitzer reported flexible tissue, blood vessel structures and apparent cells recovered from a Tyrannosaurus femur, and further finds have since been reported including material identified as collagen and possible fragments of protein.

I want to handle this carefully, because it is often overstated. The researchers involved do not conclude that the bones are young. They propose preservation mechanisms, including iron from blood acting as a fixative, and that discussion is ongoing in the literature.

What I will say is that nobody expected organic material to survive tens of millions of years, and the discovery was resisted for years precisely because it seemed impossible. When a finding surprises everybody, it is fair to ask whether an assumption somewhere needs revisiting.

What to do with a child’s question

When a child asks about dinosaurs in Scripture, resist two temptations. Do not tell them the creatures are a hoax, because they will see the bones and conclude that you were either lying or ignorant. Do not tell them it does not matter, because to them it plainly does.

Tell them instead that God made them, that Job describes at least one of them, that they were probably on the ark, and that something changed afterwards which they could not survive. That is an honest answer built from the text.

Then let the wonder do its work. A God who made a creature with a tail like a cedar is a God worth knowing, and the psalmist’s response to the great creatures of the deep was not embarrassment but praise.

Why the silence is not surprising

People sometimes assume that if these creatures lived alongside humanity the Bible would be full of them. That expectation misunderstands what the Bible is. It is not a survey of the animal kingdom, and it names remarkably few creatures overall.

There is no mention of the kangaroo, the penguin or the polar bear either, and nobody concludes from that silence that Australia is fictional. The animals that appear in Scripture are the ones that crossed the path of the people whose story is being told, in a narrow strip of the ancient Near East.

So the relative scarcity of dinosaurs in Scripture is what you would expect even on a young earth reading. Job’s two chapters are the exception rather than the gap, and the fact that we have any description at all of creatures like these is more remarkable than the fact that we do not have many. Anyone hunting for dinosaurs in Scripture should be looking for traces rather than a catalogue, and the traces are there.

So, now what?

Read Job 38 to 41 in one go. It is the longest speech God gives in the Bible and it is almost entirely about animals, which should tell us something about how He regards His own creation.

Then take a child to a museum and talk about the difference between the bones, which anybody can see, and the dates on the label, which nobody watched. That single distinction will serve them for the rest of their lives.

And let the question do to you what it did to Job. He had a great deal to say until God started describing the animals, and then he put his hand over his mouth. When did creation last leave you speechless?

Behold, Behemoth, which I made as I made you; he eats grass like an ox. Behold, his strength in his loins, and his power in the muscles of his belly.

Job 40:15-16, ESV