Are dinosaurs in the Bible?
Are dinosaurs in the Bible? Not by name. You will not find dinosaur or dinosaurs in the King James Version, the NIV, the ESV, or any other English translation, for a simple reason: the word did not exist yet. The anatomist Richard Owen coined it in 1842 from Greek words meaning “terrible lizard”. The King James Bible was printed in 1611.
That does not settle the question people are really asking, which is whether the Bible describes animals that could have been dinosaurs. Two creatures come up every time: behemoth and leviathan. Both are in the King James Bible, and you can read every verse below and make up your own mind.
Behemoth: the land creature
Behemoth appears exactly 1 time in the KJV, at the start of God’s second speech to Job:
- Job 40:15: Behold now behemoth, which I made with thee; he eateth grass as an ox.
The description continues for ten verses. Behemoth eats grass like an ox, his strength is in his loins, he “moveth his tail like a cedar” (Job 40:17), his bones are like bars of iron, and he lies under the shady trees in the marsh. The tail line is the one most often quoted by people who see a sauropod here, since a hippopotamus has a short tail. Others answer that “tail” may be a poetic or polite word, and that an animal living in reeds and rivers fits a hippo well. Both readings are common; the text itself does not name a species.
Leviathan: the sea creature
Leviathan appears 5 times in 4 verses. Isaiah 27:1 uses the name twice:
- Job 41:1: Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down?
- Psalms 74:14: Thou brakest the heads of leviathan in pieces, and gavest him to be meat to the people inhabiting the wilderness.
- Psalms 104:26: There go the ships: there is that leviathan, whom thou hast made to play therein.
- Isaiah 27:1: In that day the LORD with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish leviathan the piercing serpent, even leviathan that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea.
Job 41 gives the long description: scales so close that no air can come between them, a mouth from which “go burning lamps, and sparks of fire leap out”, and a body no hook or spear can harm. People have matched leviathan with crocodiles, whales, marine reptiles, and the sea monsters of older Near Eastern myths. Psalm 74:14 speaks of breaking the heads of leviathan, plural heads, which pushes some readers toward the mythic reading.
The same Isaiah verse that names leviathan also names the dragon in the sea, which is why the two creatures are so often discussed together. The dragons page lists every verse that uses the word and explains which ones are really jackals.
Are dinosaurs in the Bible under other names?
The King James translators also used dragon 19 times and dragons 16 times, plus words like cockatrice and satyr, because they translated rare Hebrew animal names with the most impressive creature words they knew. That habit also explains the unicorns in the KJV. Words for real animals that you might expect, such as cat and elephant, are not in it at all.
Want to test a word list of your own? Paste it into the Bible word checker. It marks every word that appears in the KJV in green and shows how many times it is used, so you can confirm in a second that behemoth is there and dinosaur is not. That is the fairest answer to “are dinosaurs in the Bible?”: the creatures are debated, the word is simply absent.
Frequently asked questions
Is the word dinosaur in the Bible?
No. Neither dinosaur nor dinosaurs appears in the King James Bible or in any other English translation. The word was invented by the British scientist Richard Owen in 1842, more than two centuries after the KJV was printed.
Are there dinosaurs in the Bible?
Not by name, and the Bible never describes an animal as extinct or ancient in the way we now describe dinosaurs. People who say yes point to behemoth in Job 40 and leviathan in Job 41; people who say no read those passages as a hippopotamus, a crocodile, or poetic images of power. The text does not settle it.
What is the behemoth in Job 40?
Behemoth is a huge land animal described in Job 40:15–24: it eats grass like an ox, has strength in its loins, and moves its tail like a cedar. Many scholars identify it with the hippopotamus or the elephant; some creationist writers read it as a sauropod dinosaur. The Bible itself gives no other name.
Is leviathan a dinosaur?
Leviathan appears 5 times in the KJV, in Job, Psalms, and Isaiah. Job 41 describes it as an armored sea creature that cannot be caught; Psalm 104:26 has it playing in the sea. Readers have linked it to crocodiles, whales, sea reptiles, or a mythic chaos monster. The text does not say which.
Are dragons in the Bible the same as dinosaurs?
The King James Bible uses dragon and dragons 35 times, mostly for sea monsters, desert animals, and the symbolic dragon of Revelation. Some readers connect them with dinosaurs, but the Hebrew words behind them are usually translated as serpent, sea monster, or jackal in modern Bibles.