to do or make · verb, qal perfect, 1st person common singular
eateth
יֹאכֵֽלyo.Khel
H398
to eat (literally or figuratively) · verb, qal imperfect, 3rd person masculine singular
grass
חָ֝צִ֗ירcha.Tzir
H2682
grass · noun, common masculine singular absolute
ox
כַּבָּקָ֥רka.ba.Kar
H1241
beef cattle or an animal of the ox family of either gen… · preposition with the article + noun, common both genders singular absolute
Strong's Exhaustive Concordance (James Strong, 1890/1894), public domain; digitized by Open Scriptures (CC BY-SA). KJV word tagging: eBible.org (public domain). Original-language text, parsing and brief lexicon: STEPBible.org data from Tyndale House, Cambridge (CC BY 4.0).
Cross-references
Genesis 1:24-26 And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kin…
Job 40:20 Surely the mountains bring him forth food, where all the beasts of the field play.
Psalms 104:14 He causeth the grass to grow for the cattle, and herb for the service of man: that he may bring forth food out of the earth;
Job 39:8 The range of the mountains is his pasture, and he searcheth after every green thing.
Cross-references from OpenBible.info (CC BY), in the lineage of the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge (public domain).
Commentary
Matthew Henry on Job 40:15–end
God, for the further proving of his own power and disproving of Job's pretensions, concludes his discourse with the description of two vast and mighty animals, far exceeding man in bulk and strength, one he calls behemoth, the other leviathan. In these verses we have the former described. "Behold now behemoth, and consider whether thou art able to contend with him who made that beast and gave him all the power he has, and whether it is not thy wisdom rather to submit to him and make thy peace with him." Behemoth signifies beasts in general, but must here be meant of some one particular species. Some understand it of the bull; others of an amphibious animal, well known (they say) in Egypt, ca…
God shows that if Job cannot bring under control the lower animals (of which he selects the two most striking, behemoth on land, leviathan in the water), much less is he capable of governing the world.
behemoth--The description in part agrees with the hippopotamus, in part with the elephant, but exactly in all details with neither. It is rather a poetical personification of the great Pachydermata, or Herbivora (so "he eateth grass"), the idea of the hippopotamus being predominant. In Job 40:17, "the tail like a cedar," hardly applies to the latter (so also Job 40:20, Job 40:23, "Jordan," a river which elephants alone could reach, but see on Job 40:23). On the other hand, Job 40:21-22 are c…
Behold now behemoth - The word בהמות behemoth is the plural of בהמה behemah, which signifies cattle in general, or graminivorous animals, as distinguished from חיתו chayetho, all wild or carnivorous animals. See Gen 1:24. The former seems to mean kine, horses, asses, sheep, etc., and all employed in domestic or agricultural matters; the latter, all wild and savage beasts, such as lions, bears, tigers, etc.: but the words are not always taken in these senses.
In this place it has been supposed to mean some animal of the beeve kind. The Vulgate retains the Hebrew name; so do the Syriac and Arabic. The Chaldee is indefinite, translating creature or animal. And the Septuagint is not more explici…
The Church Fathers
The Behemoth is a dragon, that is, a land animal, just as the Leviathan is an aquatic sea animal.
Through the creation of such a hateful and tremendous beast people are given three opportunities of edification. They can recognize that the power of the Creator did not only make those beasts that would have served human beings but also fashioned those who frighten them; they can understand the goodness of Providence, because it removed those beasts that would have been deadly from the midst [of humans] and placed them in the wilderness. There they can learn how severe he is against vices. These [beasts] that are troublesome to mortals according to their size and strength are also subject to his regulation.
The Behemoth is a dragon without equal. The Interpreter calls it "an imaginary dragon" that the author [of the book of Job] has poetically invented by himself. He has reported many statements in the name of Job, of his friends and in the name of God himself that are not appropriate to them, that appear to be unlikely. In the whole creation, he says, there is no animal that is unique and not male or female, because all animals have been created in pairs. On the other hand, those who assert that this book was written by the divine Moses maintain the reality of the Behemoth. It is a figure of Satan, they say, and as this animal destroys everything it sees, so Satan does the same thing secretly, and therefore it has been made Satan's accomplice in crime. Both in its name and in its action it is the figure of Satan, because, according to the sense of the word, Behemoth means "through it death," that is, death has entered among people through it. But the Jews assert that it is an ox, and, some day they will eat it and the Leviathan as well when they come back.
The Church Fathers: public-domain translations (Ante-Nicene and Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers), verse-indexed by SermonIndex (CC BY 4.0).
Dictionary and topics
Behemoth — (Job 40:15-24). Some have supposed this to be an Egyptian word meaning a “water-ox.” The Revised Version has here in the margin “hippopotamus,” which is probably the correct rendering of the word.…
Grass — (1.) Heb. hatsir, ripe grass fit for mowing (1 Kings 18:5; Job 40:15; Ps. 104:14). As the herbage rapidly fades under the scorching sun, it is used as an image of the brevity of human life (Isa.…
Leek — (Heb. hatsir; the Allium porrum), rendered “grass” in 1 Kings 18:5, 2 Kings 19:26, Job 40:15, etc.; “herb” in Job 8:12; “hay” in Prov. 27:25, and Isa. 15:6; “leeks” only in Num. 11:5. This Hebrew…
B · Unclean: Behemoth — Unclean: Behemoth
Behemoth · An amphibious animal — An amphibious animal
Elephant · (Margin A. V.) — (Margin A. V.)
Hippopotamus · (Margin R. V.) — (Margin R. V.)
Ox, The · Was fed: With grass — Was fed: With grass
Dictionary: Easton's (1897) and Smith's (1863), public domain. Topics: Nave's Topical Bible (1896) and Torrey's Topical Textbook (1897), public domain. Both as parsed by NEUU (CC BY 4.0).
Behold, now behemoth,.... The word is plural, and signifies beasts, and may be used to denote the chiefest and largest of beasts, and therefore is commonly understood of the elephant; and certain it is that a single beast is described in the following account, and so the word is rendered, Psalm 73:22; The word is here rendered by the Septuagint "beasts"; which is the word used by the Greeks (c) for elephants as "belluae", a word of the same signification, is by the Latins (d): and so the Sabines called an elephant "barrus", and the Indians "barro" (e), a "beast"; and it may be observed, that ivory is called "shenhabbim", 1 Kings 10:22; that is, "shenhabehim", "behem" or "behemoth" (f), the…
15 Behold now the behmth,
Which I have made with thee:
He eateth grass like an ox.
16 Behold now, his strength is in his loins,
And his force in the sinews of his belly.
17 He bendeth his tail like a cedar branch,
The sinews of his legs are firmly interwoven.
18 His bones are like tubes of brass,
His bones like bars of iron.
בּהמות (after the manner of the intensive plur. הוללות, חכמות, which play the part of the abstract termination), which sounds like a plur., but without the numerical plural signification, considered as Hebrew, denotes the beast κατ ̓ ἐξοχήν, or the giant of beasts, is however Hebraized from the Egyptian p-ehe-mau, (muau), i.e., the (p) ox (ehe) of the water (mau as in…
Following a list of natural animals (39:1-30), God described Behemoth (40:15-24) and Leviathan (41:1-34) as creatures that man cannot tame. Job couldn’t tame the wild donkey or ox (39:5-12), let alone Behemoth and Leviathan (40:15-24), but God created them and could control them, and Job had to acknowledge it (41:2). • Here Behemoth seems to be a natural creature: (1) It is an animal that God made, just as he made Job (40:15); (2) it is not a dreadful predator but eats grass like an ox (40:15); and (3) it is in a poem describing God’s creation of the natural order, rather than in a mythological story of the world’s formation. Most commentators identify Behemoth with the hippopotamus, a huge,…
