בְּהֵמוֹת

From the study of Job 40:15

Range of meaning

The base word behemah (H929) means a large four-footed animal: livestock, beasts in general, land animals as opposed to birds and fish. Its regular plural is behemot, "beasts", and it appears that way in other passages (Deuteronomy 32:24; Isaiah 30:6; Joel 1:20; Psalm 50:10; Job 12:7). Only here (Strong's gives it a separate number, H930) do the plural form and the singular verbs ("he eats", "his strength", vv. 15–24) show it means a single creature. Most lexicons (BDB, HALOT) explain this as a plural of intensity, where a plural form means "the ultimate example": "the Beast", "the super-beast", the beast that sums up all beasts.

Against the English

English versions keep it as a proper name, "Behemoth" (capitalized in BSB, NIV, ESV, NASB; lower-case in KJV and WEB). That is defensible, but it hides that a Hebrew hearer heard a familiar word, "beasts", turned into a title. Some older and paraphrase translations put "hippopotamus" in the text or margin. That is one interpretation, not a translation.

How it drifted

The English common noun "behemoth" (anything enormous, as in "a corporate behemoth") comes from this passage. Readers now hear "huge" as what the word means. The Hebrew word itself means "beast(s)". The hugeness comes from the poem's description in verses 16–24, not from the word.

Used elsewhere in the period

Ordinary plural use: Psalm 50:10 "the behemot on a thousand hills"; Psalm 73:22 "I was behemot with you ('immakh)", meaning "like a dumb beast before you", strikingly close to our verse's wording. Job 12:7: "ask now the behemot, and they will teach you." A proposed Egyptian origin (p3-iḥ-mw, "water-ox", that is, the hippopotamus) was popular from the 18th century, but no such Egyptian word has been found, and most specialists now reject it. In Second Temple Jewish writings Behemoth becomes a cosmic monster: 1 Enoch 60:7–9 (a male beast in a wilderness east of Eden, partner to the female Leviathan in the sea); 4 Ezra 6:49–52 (created at the start, given a land of "a thousand mountains", picking up Psalm 50:10); 2 Baruch 29:4 (kept as food for the righteous in the messianic age). Later rabbinic tradition develops the end-time banquet of Behemoth and Leviathan (Babylonian Talmud, Bava Batra 74b–75a).