Dinosaurs and the BibleDinosaurs and the Bible

Most of us loved reading about dinosaurs at some time in our lives. In 1993, the movie “Jurassic Park” stimulated the public interest in dinosaurs far beyond its previous level. As a result, increasing numbers of people have thought, “Since we have found all these fossils and dinosaur bones, we know dinosaurs existed. How come they are not mentioned in the Bible?”

Actually, dinosaurs are mentioned in the Bible, and we will prove it by doing the following three things:

violet ball Examining the Bible’s text and the related scientific facts.
violet ball Explaining the accuracy of the Bible.
violet ball Exploring what we are taught in school and through the media.
The Bible’s Text

The Bible refers to many the common animals we know today. The list includes lions, wolves, bears, sheep, cattle and dogs along with various kinds of birds, rodents, reptiles, and insects. What is interesting is that this extensive list includes three animals that we no longer recognize. These three are (in the original Hebrew language) tanniyn, b@hemowth (yes, it’s spelled correctly—at least as close as we can get in Roman characters), and livyathan.

Although we alter the spelling of behemoth and Leviathan slightly, we still use those same words in bibles today. However, tanniyn is always translated into another word when we write it in English. Tanniyn occurs 28 times in the Bible and is normally translated “dragon.” It is also translated “serpent,” “sea monster,” “dinosaur,” “great creature,” and “reptile.” Behemoth and Leviathan are relatively specific creatures, perhaps each was a single kind of animal. Tanniyn is a more general term, and it can be thought of as the original version of the word “dinosaur.” The word “dinosaur” was originally coined in 1841, more than three thousand years after the Bible first referred to “Tanniyn.” To make things clearer, we constructed the following table comparing the scientific names with the Biblical names tanniyn, behemoth, and Leviathan.

Leviathan has the following attributes according to Job chapter 41, Psalm 104:25,26 and Isaiah 27:1. This is only a partial listing—just enough to make the point.

* “No one is so fierce that he would dare stir him up.”
* “Who can open the doors of his face, with his terrible teeth all around?”
* “His rows of scales are his pride, shut up tightly as with a seal; one is so near another that no air can come between them; they are joined one to another, they stick together and cannot be parted.”
* “His sneezings flash forth light, and his eyes are like the eyelids of the morning. Out of his mouth go burning lights; sparks of fire shoot out. Smoke goes out of his nostrils, as from a boiling pot and burning rushes. His breath kindles coals, and a flame goes out of his mouth.”
* “Though the sword reaches him, it cannot avail; nor does spear, dart, or javelin. He regards iron as straw, and bronze as rotten wood. The arrow cannot make him flee; slingstones become like stubble to him. Darts are regarded as straw; he laughs at the threat of javelins.”
* “On earth there is nothing like him, which is made without fear.”
* Leviathan “played” in the “great and wide sea” (a paraphrase of Psalm 104 verses 25 and 26—get the exact sense by reading them yourself).
* Leviathan is a “reptile [a] that is in the sea.” (Isaiah 27:1)

What We Are Taught (In School and Through the Media)

Since humans are in the Bible, we unconsciously think that dinosaurs were extinct—and therefore not mentioned in the Bible. As you have just seen, the Bible not only refers to dinosaurs, but has detailed information about two of them.

Unfortunately, our public school system and the media have convinced us that dinosaurs were extinct at least 60 million years before man appeared on earth. They have done such a good job in this area that we can not imagine people and dinosaurs living at the same time. The fact is that dinosaurs were created no more than one day before mankind, not many millions of years earlier—and we have evidence to support that statement. Click here to see our Creation and Evolution page, and a link to many sites that fully prove this.

There is a lot of quality scientific information available regarding dinosaurs in the Bible. In time, we will put together a list of links (or recommend a good list of links we find on the web). For now, we would like to recommend two excellent sources of books, video tapes, and audio cassettes on this topic.


For more information related to dinosaurs, visit rareresource.com.