When Dragons Walked with Men

Where do dinosaurs fit?

At Minchah we just read the beginning of next week’s parashah: “These are the generations of Noach” (Genesis 6:9). We heard that “the earth was filled with violence” (6:11), and that Hashem told Noach, “Make thee an ark of gopher wood… and shalt pitch it within and without with pitch” (6:14). Next week we will study the flood. But before the waters come, let’s ask a question about the animals that lived in the world before the flood, the biggest ones of all.

Ask a room full of first graders, “When did dinosaurs live?” and they will all shout the same answer: “Millions of years ago!” They can barely read, but they already know that line by heart. It is on the first page of their dinosaur books, on the signs in front of every museum skeleton, and in every movie.

For about two hundred years, many believers have not known what to do with dinosaurs. Some have said the bones are a trick. Others have bent the Torah to make room for “millions of years,” with ideas like the “gap theory” or “day-age theory.” But there is no need to do either one. The bones are real. Dinosaurs really lived. The only question is when.

A famous science magazine once wrote: “No human being has ever seen a live dinosaur.” Now, did the writer know that, or did he think that? To know it, he would have had to ask every person who ever lived, starting with Adam and Chavah. He thought it. He did not know it.

The Torah tells us when the great creatures were made. On the fifth day: “God created great whales [tanninim], and every living creature that moveth” (Genesis 1:21). On the sixth day, the same day as Adam: “God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind” (1:25). And Moshe says plainly: “In six days Hashem made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is” (Exodus 20:11). If Hashem made everything in six days, then Adam saw dinosaurs.

In fact, Adam named them: “Out of the ground Hashem God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them” (Genesis 2:19). Some people say no one could name that many animals in one day. Really? If you can say 300 words a minute, you can name every basic kind of animal in less than half an hour. And Adam was no ordinary man. Our sages say:

When Hashem was about to create Adam, the angels asked, “What is the nature of this man?” Hashem brought the animals before the angels and asked, “What is the name of this one?” They did not know. Then He brought them before Adam. “What is this one’s name?” “An ox.” “And this one?” “A camel.” “And this one?” “A donkey.” (Bereshit Rabbah 17:4)

Adam was wiser than the angels. Imagine someone telling him that dinosaurs lived millions of years ago. He would point out the window and say, “What are you talking about? There’s one in the backyard eating the fig tree!”

Why isn’t “dinosaur” in the Bible?

People sometimes say, “Dinosaurs aren’t in the Bible.” Well, the word isn’t. The word “dinosaur” was made up in 1841 by an English scientist named Richard Owen. It means “terrible lizard.” The King James Bible was translated in 1611, and the Torah was given long before that. Of course you won’t find a word that wasn’t invented yet.

Before 1841, what did people call these huge reptiles? Dragons. And dragons are all over the Bible. The Hebrew word is tannin, and the King James Version translates it “dragon” or “serpent” or “whale,” more than thirty times in all:

• When Aharon threw down his staff before Pharaoh, “it became a serpent [tannin]” (Exodus 7:10). That was no garden snake, because it swallowed the magicians’ staffs.

• “Praise Hashem from the earth, ye dragons, and all deeps” (Psalm 148:7).

• “The young lion and the dragon shalt thou trample under feet” (Psalm 91:13).

• “In that day Hashem with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish leviathan the piercing serpent… and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea” (Isaiah 27:1).

• Isaiah also speaks of “the viper and fiery flying serpent” in the land of the south (Isaiah 30:6).

The Bible talks about dragons the same way it talks about lions and bears: as real animals that people knew about.

What happened to the dragons?

If people lived with dinosaurs, where did they go? First, they had to get through the flood. We just heard how big the ark was: “The length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits, the breadth of it fifty cubits, and the height of it thirty cubits” (Genesis 6:15). That’s about 450 feet long, a floating building one and a half football fields long. But could dinosaurs fit? Creation teachers say Noach didn’t need to bring the biggest animals he could find. He brought young ones: smaller, lighter, and with their whole lives ahead of them to fill the earth again. The biggest dinosaur egg is smaller than a football. Our sages had the same idea about the giant re’em: “Rabbi Yannai said: They brought its young ones into the ark” (Zevachim 113b).

A flood that covered the whole world would never be forgotten. Think how long people talk about one big hurricane! And it wasn’t forgotten. Researchers have collected around 270 flood stories from cultures all over the world:

• The Hawaiians tell that long after the first man, the world became wicked. One good man was left, named Nu’u. He built a great canoe with a house on it and filled it with animals. The waters covered the earth, and only Nu’u and his family were saved.

• The Chinese tell of Fuxi, the father of their civilization, who escaped a great flood with his wife, three sons and three daughters. They were the only people left alive, and they filled the earth again.

• The Toltecs of Mexico said the first world lasted 1,716 years and was destroyed by a flood that covered the highest mountains. Only one family survived. By the count of our sages, the flood came in the year 1656 from creation (Seder Olam 1). Not bad for a legend passed down for over four thousand years!

Why would people all over the world tell the same story about one family, a boat and a flood that covered the earth? Because it really happened.

But after the flood, the world was different. As we learned this morning, the air, the climate and the length of life all changed. And something else changed too. Hashem told Noach: “The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth” (Genesis 9:2). From then on, man and the great beasts were enemies.

Think about it this way. Three hundred years ago, there were grizzly bears roaming the woods of Georgia. Today there are none. When people move in, the big, dangerous animals are killed off or driven away. And whoever bags the biggest one is a hero.

That’s exactly what happened to the dragons. If you killed a dragon, people told stories about you for a thousand years. And that’s just what we find. All over the world, in every culture, there are stories and pictures of people meeting, fighting and killing dragons:

• The Greek historian Herodotus wrote that he traveled to Arabia to ask about winged serpents. He saw “the backbones and ribs of serpents in such numbers as it is impossible to describe,” and said their wings were like a bat’s.

• Josephus, the Jewish historian, wrote that when Moshe led an Egyptian army against Kush (Ethiopia), the road was full of flying serpents. Moshe brought baskets of ibis birds, which eat snakes, to clear the way (Antiquities 2.10). Josephus says that is how Moshe came to marry a Kushite princess (see Numbers 12:1).

• The famous Ishtar Gate of Babylon, built in Nebuchadnezzar’s time, is covered with pictures of lions, bulls and a long-necked, scaly dragon. You can still see it today.

• The Chinese calendar has twelve animals: eleven real animals, and the dragon. Why would they put one make-believe animal in a list of real ones?

• A Chinese legend says that after a great flood, a ruler named Yu drained the land and drove the snakes and dragons out of the marshes so people could live there.

• In the old English poem Beowulf, the hero tears the arm off a monster called Grendel. At the end of his life, he fights a fire-breathing dragon, and it kills him.

• The Vikings carved dragon heads on the front of their ships.

• In the French city of Rouen, a dragon called La Gargouille was said to rise out of the river. After it was killed, its head was mounted on a building. That is where we get the word “gargoyle,” from the French word for “throat,” the same root as “gargle.”

• Another French town, Nerluc, changed its name to Tarascon after a dragon called the Tarasque was killed there.

Native Americans drew them too. On Kachina Bridge in Natural Bridges National Monument, Utah, there is a very old rock carving that looks like a long-necked dinosaur. In 1924, an expedition in Havasupai Canyon in Arizona reported a cliff drawing that looked like a dinosaur standing on its hind legs. The leader wrote that if a prehistoric man drew a dinosaur, it “upsets completely all of our theories.” And in 1673, the French explorers Marquette and Joliet saw a huge painting of a winged monster on the cliffs at Alton, Illinois. The local people called it the Piasa Bird and said their ancestors had killed it.

In Peru, there are thousands of carved stones called the Ica stones. Creation teachers point out that hundreds of them show people living with dinosaurs: riding them, fighting them, and spearing them through the throat. Some of the dinosaurs on the stones are carved with rows of round patterns on their skin. That is interesting, because when fossil dinosaur skin was studied, it showed round, pebbly scales in patterns just like that. You can’t learn that from bones alone. And at Acámbaro, Mexico, more than 30,000 clay figures were dug up in the 1940s, and many of them look like dinosaurs.

Even our sages tell a dragon story, about Daniel in Babylon:

Nebuchadnezzar had a great serpent [tannin] that swallowed everything that was thrown to it. Daniel said to the king, “Give me permission, and I will make it weak.” The king gave him permission. Daniel took straw and hid nails inside it, and threw it to the serpent. The nails tore its insides apart. (Bereshit Rabbah 68:13)

A longer version of this story appears in the Greek additions to the book of Daniel. Those chapters are not Scripture, but they tell how the Babylonians worshiped a living dragon. Daniel boiled pitch, fat and hair into lumps and fed them to it, “and the dragon burst asunder.” Think about the science! Pitch is sticky tree sap, the same kind of pitch Noach used to seal the ark (Genesis 6:14). Animals love the salty taste of fat. And hair does not digest. Daniel’s little lumps clogged the dragon’s insides, and in the days before plumbers, that was the end of the dragon.

And there is one more clue, hidden in the bones themselves. In 2005, a scientist named Mary Schweitzer broke open a Tyrannosaurus rex leg bone and found something no one expected: soft, stretchy tissue and what looked like blood vessels. Since then, soft tissue has been found in other dinosaur bones too. Scientists are now trying to figure out how soft tissue could last for 68 million years. Maybe they should ask a different question. Maybe it hasn’t been that long.

Behold now Behemoth

The best place to find a dinosaur in the Bible is the book of Job. Our sages say “Moshe wrote his own book, the section of Bilam, and the book of Job” (Bava Batra 14b), and they debate when Job lived. Some say in the days of Yaakov, others in the days of Moshe (Bava Batra 15a–b). Either way, Job lived long ago, when lifespans were still long. After his trials, “lived Job an hundred and forty years, and saw his sons, and his sons’ sons, even four generations” (Job 42:16).

You know the story. Job lost his flocks, his servants and all ten of his children in one day, and his friends spent over thirty chapters telling him it was his own fault. They were wrong (42:7). When someone is suffering, we don’t always know why. Love them, pray for them, and don’t preach at them.

Job didn’t know the verse we know: “All things work together for good to them that love God” (Romans 8:28). That verse doesn’t say everything that happens is good. It says it all works together for good. Think of biscuits. Would you like a cup of flour for lunch? How about a spoonful of baking soda, a spoonful of salt and a half cup of shortening, washed down with buttermilk? Yuck! Each one tastes terrible by itself. But mix them together and bake them, and you get biscuits. Your hard days may not be good by themselves, but in Hashem’s hands they work together for good.

Finally, Hashem answered Job “out of the whirlwind” (38:1). He didn’t explain anything. He asked questions, dozens of them: “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?” (38:4). “Hast thou entered into the springs of the sea?” (38:16). Scientists didn’t discover the hot springs on the bottom of the ocean until 1977. “Where is the way where light dwelleth? and as for darkness, where is the place thereof?” (38:19). Light has a way: it is always moving, at 186,000 miles a second. Darkness only has a place. Darkness can’t go anywhere. When the world seems dark, the answer is simple. Turn on your light.

Job never answered one of Hashem’s questions. He didn’t need to. They weren’t meant to give him information. They were meant to change his attitude. Then Hashem showed Job the greatest creatures He had made:

“Behold now behemoth, which I made with thee; he eateth grass as an ox. Lo now, his strength is in his loins, and his force is in the navel of his belly. He moveth his tail like a cedar: the sinews of his stones are wrapped together. His bones are as strong pieces of brass; his bones are like bars of iron. He is the chief of the ways of God… He lieth under the shady trees, in the covert of the reed, and fens… Behold, he drinketh up a river, and hasteth not” (Job 40:15–19, 21, 23).

Notice: “which I made with thee.” Behemoth was made on the same day as man.

Many Christian study Bibles have a footnote that says Behemoth was probably an elephant or a hippopotamus. But read the verse again. “He moveth his tail like a cedar.” Have you ever seen an elephant’s tail? It looks like a little rope. A hippo’s tail is even smaller. Neither one is anything like a cedar tree. And Behemoth is “the chief of the ways of God,” the first and greatest of His land animals. An elephant is big, but it is not the biggest animal Hashem ever made.

Our sages saw Behemoth as something much bigger. They connect it to the verse “the cattle [behemot] upon a thousand hills” (Psalm 50:10):

Behemoth grazes on a thousand mountains every day, and they grow back for it as if it had never touched them. Whatever water the Jordan River gathers in six months, it gulps down in a single swallow. (Vayikra Rabbah 22:10)

The Talmud says Behemoth, like Leviathan, will be part of the great feast for the righteous in the World to Come (Bava Batra 74b).

Now compare that to the giant long-necked dinosaurs, the sauropods. Their tails were as thick as tree trunks and swayed like cedars. Their bones were huge and heavy, like bars of iron. One sauropod found in Oklahoma, called Sauroposeidon, may have stood about sixty feet tall. Some of these giants weighed as much as a dozen school buses. They would have eaten grass and leaves all day long and drunk enormous amounts of water. If one stepped on you, you would be deeply impressed. “He is the chief of the ways of God.”

The dragon that breathes fire

In the very next chapter, Hashem describes Leviathan, the great creature of the sea that we spoke about this morning:

“Out of his mouth go burning lamps, and sparks of fire leap out. Out of his nostrils goeth smoke, as out of a seething pot or caldron. His breath kindleth coals, and a flame goeth out of his mouth” (Job 41:19–21).

A fire-breathing dragon? Before you laugh, meet the bombardier beetle. This little insect keeps two chemicals in separate pouches in its body. When it is attacked, it mixes them in a special chamber, and they explode out of its tail in a boiling-hot spray, almost 212°F, with a loud pop. If Hashem could design a tiny beetle that shoots hot chemicals, He could design a great creature that breathes out fire.

Are some still alive?

Here is something even more surprising. There are reports from all over the world that some of these creatures may still be alive.

In 1938, fishermen off the coast of South Africa pulled up a large blue fish called a coelacanth. Scientists were stunned. They had taught that the coelacanth died out with the dinosaurs, millions of years ago. And here it was, alive and swimming. Today it is called a “living fossil.” If one “extinct” creature was hiding in the ocean, could others be hiding too?

In the middle of Africa, in the Congo, there is a swamp called the Likouala that is about the size of the state of Florida, and much of it is still unexplored. For hundreds of years, the people who live there have talked about an animal they call mokele-mbembe. They describe a huge reddish-brown creature with a long neck, a small head and a long tail, that lives in the rivers and eats a certain jungle plant. When explorers showed them pictures of animals, they passed over most of the dinosaur pictures, but picked out the long-necked sauropod right away. A University of Chicago scientist named Roy Mackal led two expeditions there in 1980 and 1981 and wrote a book called A Living Dinosaur? Missionaries who served in the region have reported the same stories from their church members.

Look again at Behemoth: “He lieth under the shady trees, in the covert of the reed, and fens.” “Fens” is an old English word for a swamp.

In Scotland, there is a deep, dark lake called Loch Ness. In 1933, a new road was built along its shore, and that very year there were dozens of reports of a strange creature in the water. Since then, there have been more than 10,000 reported sightings of “Nessie.” Most people who say they saw it describe the same thing: a long neck, a small head, a large body and four flippers. That is exactly what a plesiosaur, a swimming reptile from the age of dinosaurs, looked like. One man said he nearly hit it with his motorcycle as it crossed the road at night.

America has its own lake creatures. In Lake Champlain, between New York and Vermont, people have reported “Champ” for hundreds of years. In 1977, a woman named Sandra Mansi was sitting by the lake with her family when a head and long neck rose out of the water. She watched it for several minutes and took one photograph. When someone asked her if she thought she saw a dinosaur, she answered, “I don’t think. I know I saw a dinosaur.” Why only one picture? “I didn’t want to miss anything,” she said. Canada has “Ogopogo” in Lake Okanagan.

In 1977, a Japanese fishing boat, the Zuiyo Maru, pulled up the rotting body of a huge creature in its net off the coast of New Zealand. It was about 32 feet long and weighed about 4,000 pounds, with what looked like a long neck, a small head and four flippers, just like a plesiosaur. It smelled so terrible that the captain had it thrown back into the sea, but not before the crew took photographs and made sketches. Some scientists said it was probably a dead basking shark. The fishermen said they knew what basking sharks looked like, and this wasn’t one. Japan even printed a postage stamp of it.

And there are reports of flying reptiles too. In Zambia and the Congo, people describe a creature they call kongamato, which means “breaker of boats.” It has leathery wings like a bat, no feathers, and a beak full of teeth. When they are shown pictures, they point to a pterodactyl. On the island of Papua New Guinea, people tell of a large flying creature called the ropen, which is said to glow at night. And Native Americans told of the Thunderbird, a giant flying creature. One story says that when one was found dead, its wings stretched about 20 feet across, and it had a bony crest on the back of its head, just like a pterosaur. Remember Isaiah’s “fiery flying serpent” (Isaiah 30:6)?

Of course, some of these reports are mistakes, and some photographs are fakes. But a fake twenty-dollar bill doesn’t prove there’s no such thing as a real one. The best thing to do is what good scientists should always do: look at all the evidence, consider all the possibilities, and study it out for yourself.

Dragons for the glory of Hashem

So why does any of this matter?

Because dinosaurs have been used to pull children away from the Torah. When a child hears “millions of years ago” over and over, he begins to think, “If the Bible is wrong about dinosaurs, maybe it’s wrong about everything.” The museums, the textbooks and the movies are preaching a message. We need to answer it.

There is something fitting about that. In the beginning, the serpent used a lie to lead people away from Hashem. And the Brit Hadashah calls the enemy “the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil” (Revelation 20:2). But the dragons were never his. Hashem made them, and they belong to Him. Our sages teach:

Of all that the Holy One, blessed be He, created in His world, He did not create a single thing without a purpose. (Shabbat 77b)

So let’s take the dinosaurs back. Children love them. Use them to teach how great Hashem is. When you see a skeleton in a museum, don’t think “millions of years.” Think, “O Hashem, how manifold are thy works! in wisdom hast thou made them all… There go the ships: there is that leviathan, whom thou hast made to play therein” (Psalm 104:24, 26).

How big is your God? Big enough to make a creature whose tail moves like a cedar tree. Big enough to make the sea monster that will one day become the sukkah of the righteous. And big enough to make you, and to know you, and to love you.

“Praise Hashem from the earth, ye dragons, and all deeps” (Psalm 148:7).

Shabbat shalom.