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בְּהֵמוֹת

dinosaur

‘dinosaur’ is one of 2 main senses fuller range ↓

H930 Strong's Hebrew
bᵉhêmôwth Transliteration
/be-hay-mohth'/ Pronunciation
Usage in the Hebrew Bible 1 appearance

Compare with another word →

About this entry

At a glance — auto-summarized from this page’s data, not written by a person. Every figure links to its source below. This summary describes the numbers; it doesn’t interpret them.

בהמות (bᵉhêmôwth) is a Hebrew noun most often rendered “dinosaur.” A scarce word — 1 verse in all of the Hebrew Bible. Job dominates its distribution — 1 of 1 verses. Found nowhere else but Job 40:15. Ranging over 2 senses, it is not a single-sense word. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
Behemoth
Modern gloss
dinosaur
Strong's 1890 sometimes compressed multiple senses — or homonymous roots — under one number, and used 19th-century English phrasing that no longer carries the same connotation. The modern gloss reflects current BDB scholarship; open the Lexicon Entry tab for the full sense breakdown. Download share card

About this word

Strong's H930 catalogs a Hebrew word from the Hebrew Old Testament.

These counts are not copied from any lexicon or concordance. They are computed here, from the morphology-tagged Hebrew Old Testament. What Lemma adds →

1
distinct verses
The word appears in 1 distinct verse.
1 / 39
OT books
The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
Job 40:15
only appearance
This word occurs only once, in Job 40:15.
#6,101
by frequency
Rank #6,101 (rank 6,101 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).

View all 1 occurrence in the concordance →


Most concentrated in

  • Job 1 verse 100%

By section of the Old Testament

  • Pentateuch 0 · 0%
  • Historical 0 · 0%
  • Wisdom 1 · 100%
  • Prophets 0 · 0%

By traditional corpus

Conventional, traditional groupings — biblical authorship is debated, so this is a traditional corpus grouping, not an authorship claim. Each share is this word’s portion of its verses in that division of the Hebrew canon. Each figure is a share of the word’s 1 distinct verse.

  • Writings (Ketuvim) 1 verse · 100%

How translations render this word

Counts come from each version’s own published word-to-Strong’s tagging or interlinear alignment — an approximate guide to how each version renders this word, not a word-level alignment the data otherwise carries. Because each total is that version’s own tagged count, the per-version totals vary from one another and need not match the appearance or distinct-verse counts above. These counts may also differ from a printed concordance because Lemma counts each distinctly tagged rendering and does not collapse phrase taggings into a single head-word total. This is a fixed set of word-tagged versions (KJV, ASV, BSB, ULT) and does not change with the reading translation you choose elsewhere. Each version’s license is shown beside its name below (and on Sources).

  • King James Version: Behold now behemoth 1×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Behemoth 1×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: Behemoth 1×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders H930 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Behold now behemoth” 1×

Berean Standard Bible Public Domain

Renders H930 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Behemoth” 1×

unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Renders H930 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Behemoth” 1×

Senses in BDB

The 2 senses BDB distinguishes for this word, in lexicon order (not ranked by frequency or importance). The full entry — with sub-senses — is in the Lexicon Entry tab.

  1. perhaps an extinct dinosaur
  2. a Diplodocus or Brachiosaurus, exact meaning unknown

Word origin

n.m. behemoth, i.e. hippopotamus (appar. pl. intens. of foreg.; according to Di Jb 40:15 cf. De Is 30:6 from an (assumed) Egyptian p-ehemau, ox of the water) Jb 40:15 (on identity, cf. further BoHieroz. iii. 705); prob. also ψ 73:22 בְּהֵמוֹת הָיִיתִי עִמָּ֑ךְ a behemoth was I with (toward) thee (so Hi De; Che beasts); according to De Or also in בַּהֲמוֹת Is 30:6 the burden of the behemoth of the south (supposed to be a designation of Egypt; but this unlikely, cf. Che Di, read therefore) rather beasts of the south, viz. of Judah.

— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.

Derived from בהמה (bᵉhêmâh) (H929) — beast.

Part of speech: Noun Masculine TWOT: 208b


Jastrow Dictionary

A second Hebrew/Aramaic lexicon for comparison, covering Aramaic and post-biblical (Talmudic, Targumic, Midrashic) usage that the biblical-Hebrew BDB does not. Matched by lemma rather than by Strong’s number, so a lemma may carry more than one Jastrow headword (shown separately below), and the entries cover usage well beyond the Bible.

בְּהֵמָה

  • , Æthiop. to be dumb; √בה, v. בהי) cattle, quadruped domestic animal (mostly of the horned race); in gen. dumb beast, opp. to man. Gen. R. s. 20 ב׳ חיה ועופות domestic animals, wild beasts, and birds; a. fr.—ב׳ גסה large cattle (of the bovine race); ב׳ דקה small cattle (sheep, goats &c.). Bekh. 8ᵃ; a. fr.—בֶּהֱמַת מלוג, ב׳ ארנונא &c., v. מְלוּג, אַרְנוֹנָא &c.—Pl. בְּהֵמוֹת Gen. R. s. 86; a. fr.

בְּהֵמוֹת

  • Coptic p-ehe-mau, water-ox, Ges.) in Rabbin. lit. B’hemoth, a legendary animal reserved for the righteous in the hereafter; cmp. לִוְיָתָן. Lev. R. s. 22 in place of the forbidden animals from which you here abstain, ב׳ בהררי אלף (I shall give you in the hereafter) ‘the b’hemoth on the thousand mountains’ (Ps. L, 10). Ib. s. 13 ב׳ ולויתן וכ׳ b’hemoth a. leviathan are the game of the righteous &c. Ib. ב׳ נותץ וכ׳ b’hemoth shall attack the leviathan with his horns &c. e.g. Psalms 50:10

A Dictionary of the Targumim, the Talmud Babli and Yerushalmi, and the Midrashic Literature (Marcus Jastrow; London, Luzac, 1903) — Public Domain. Digitized via Sefaria. Digitized via Sefaria. Full attribution on Sources.


Septuagint verse parallels

This word appears in 1 verse that also exists in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 1 Hebrew verse it occurs in. You can read those verses in Greek by switching the Old Testament edition to the Septuagint.

Read these verses in the Septuagint

This is a verse-level parallel only — the same verses exist in both the Hebrew and Greek Old Testaments. No word-level Hebrew↔Greek correspondence is claimed: the data carries no such alignment, so no Greek word is shown as this Hebrew word’s translation. Coverage is not total — the Septuagint omits the deuterocanon and renumbers the Psalms, so some Hebrew verses have no direct Greek parallel.

Reading settings

Reading text

Shown beneath each verse's original-language words.

Old Testament
Old Testament edition

Read the OT as the Masoretic Hebrew (MT) or the Greek Septuagint (LXX).

English shown for the Greek Septuagint (in the Hebrew ↔ Greek comparison).

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