What Does Job 40:15 Mean?

(15) **Behemoth.**—The identification of behemoth has always been a great difficulty with commentators. The word in Hebrew is really the natural plural of behēmāh, which means *domestic cattle; *and this fact would suggest the idea that more than one animal may be meant in the description (Job 40:15-24), which scarcely seems to answer to one and the same. In this way the Job 40:15-20 would describe very well the elephant, and Job 40:21-24 the hippopotamus. The objection to this is, that behēmāh is commonly used of domestic cattle in contrast to wild beasts, whereas neither the elephant nor the hippopotamus can come under the category of domestic animals. There is a word in Coptic (p-ehe-emmou, meaning water-ox), used for the hippopotamus, which may, perhaps, lie concealed in behemoth. Then the difficulty is to make the description answer throughout to the hippopotamus (*e.g., *Job 40:20), since the hippopotamus does not frequent mountains, neither does it exactly eat grass like an ox (Job 40:15). **Which I made with thee.**—Fellow-creatures of thine, to inhabit the world with thee: thus skilfully reminding him that he had a common origin with the beasts.