@Brain_in_a_Jar
Isn't the behemoth just a damn bull?
According to Jorge Luis Borges' 'El Libro de los Seres Imaginarios' ('The Book of Imaginary Beings', 1967):-
"Four centuries before the Christian era, Behemoth was a magnification of the of the elephant or of the hippopotamus, or a mistaken and alarmist version of these animals; it is now - precisely - the ten famous verses describing it in Job (XL:15-24) and the huge being which these lines evoke. The rest is wrangling and philology.
"The word 'Behemoth' is plural; scholars tell us it is the intensive plural form of the Hebrew b'hemah, which means 'beast'. As Fray Luis de León wrote in his Exposición del Libro de Job: 'Behemoth is a Hebrew word that stands for "beasts"; according to the received judgement of learned men, it means the elephant, so called because of its inordinate size; and being but a single animal it counts for many.'
"We are also reminded of the fact that in the first verse of Genesis in the original text, the Hebrew name for God, Elohím is plural, though the form of the verb it takes is singular - Bereshit bará Elohím et hashamáim veet haáretz. Trinitarians, by the way, have used this incongruity as an argument for the concept of the godhead being Three-in-One."
Under the entry on Bahamut he says:-
"Behemoth's fame reached the wastes of Arabia, where men altered and magnified its image. From a hippopotamus or an elephant they turned it into a fish afloat in the fathomless sea; on the fish they placed a bull, and on the bull a ruby mountain, and on the mountain an angel, and over the angel six hells, and over these hells the earth, and over the earth seven heavens. A Moslem tradition runs:
"God made the earth, but the earth had no base and so under the earth he made an angel. But the angel had no base and so under the angel's feet he made a crag of ruby. But the crag had no base and so under the crag he made a bull endowed with four thousand eyes, ears, nostrils, mouths, tongues and feet [although Borges does not name the bull here, elsewhere in the book he names it as Kujata]. But the bull had no base and so under the bull he made a fish named Bahamut, and under the fish he put water, and under the water he put darkness, and beyond this men's knowledge does not reach."
