Combining all of the original texts, revisions, translations, and interpretations of the Bible into one cohesive narrative is a bit tricky. There's a reason that most people tend to tackle the text piecemeal and not get too hung up on inconsistencies or issues of translation. That said, there are some truly bizarre creatures described in some versions and translations of the bible. Whether you decide that unicorns are metaphorical or that they actually will trample across the earth with bulls at their side at the end of days is up to you. These are the craziest creatures described in the Bible.
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00:00What's your favorite part of the Bible? If you answered the talking donkey or all the dragons
00:04that are flying around, then we've got the list for you. These are the craziest
00:08creatures described in the Bible. It's somewhat common knowledge that
00:11angels depicted as white ladies with wings actually don't appear anywhere in the Bible.
00:15In that sense, angels are more of a culturally accepted shorthand rather than a straightforward
00:20adaptation of the source material. So why have artists across the centuries decided to depict
00:24these heavenly hosts as white-garbed blonde women, as opposed to how they were described
00:28in the text? It's probably because biblical angels would have been harder to draw on
00:33church ceilings, and because they're also kind of frightening.
00:43Consider the Ophanim, first described in Ezekiel 1.15. In Jewish tradition,
00:48there are ten orders of angels, and the Ophanim are considered some of the holiest.
00:53There's a lot that you can get into about them, and parts of the description sound a bit like
00:57a fever dream. For now, suffice it to say that Ophanim are essentially flaming gyroscopes covered
01:02in eyes, guarding God's seat of power. The Behemoth is one of a handful of
01:06creatures in the Bible that historians have been arguing about for quite a while.
01:10Scholars can't agree on much in this case, but they do know two things for sure.
01:14The Behemoth was big, and he had a belly button. The Book of Job describes the Behemoth as a giant,
01:19re-dwelling creature that's too powerful for anyone except God to control. Depending on
01:24the interpretation, it could drink an entire river, and its strength was significant enough
01:28to merit mentioning four times in a single paragraph. Besides big and strong, the closest
01:33thing we get to a descriptor is a line about how his force is in the navel of his belly.
01:38So whatever Job was describing, it probably wasn't a dinosaur, considering that animals
01:42that hatch from eggs are usually short on navels. So, what could the Behemoth have been?
01:48Most modern literal interpretations point to either a hippo or an elephant,
01:52but there's also some debate as to whether it was just a metaphor for the power of God.
01:56The second creature described in the Behemoth passage of Job is the Leviathan.
02:00Where the Behemoth leaves quite a bit of wiggle room for visual interpretation,
02:04the Leviathan is bizarrely fleshed out. Simply put, Job goes into staggering detail describing
02:10all of the wildly upsetting aspects of this creature's body. Whereas the Behemoth is
02:14considered the beast of the land, the Leviathan calls the water his domain. It has double-thick
02:18armor plate running down its back and muscular folds all over its body. It breathes fire. Skin
02:23is impenetrable, tough as stone. It is, in modern parlance, hardcore rock and roll. Its name is
02:29synonymous with the unknowable and terrifying sea creatures that old sailors used to tell stories
02:33about. Cartographers mark their maps with warnings of such dangers such as the old chestnut. There
02:38be monsters here. As with the Behemoth, the Leviathan has been the subject of plenty of
02:43debate over the years. But unlike the Behemoth, the language used to describe Leviathan doesn't
02:47leave a lot of room for poetic license. While people have theorized that it may have been a
02:52crocodile or a particularly crabby whale, it's a little difficult to square that with the description
02:57of a fire-breathing rock monster.
02:59Fire! Fire! Fire! Fire!
03:02If the books of the Bible were kids in an eighth grade class photo, the Book of Revelation would
03:07be the one with too many safety pins and a sweatshirt and an X-Acto knife that it stole
03:11from art class. That's plenty clear in the case of the descriptively named First Beast,
03:16which is laid out for the reader in Revelation 13, verse 1. Also called the Beast of the Sea
03:21on account of its oceanic origin, the first beast sports a flirty summer look featuring
03:25ten horns with crowns on top of them. The name of Blasphemy is written across all seven of its heads,
03:31and it also has the feet of a bear and the mouth of a lion. Furthermore, it's described as taking
03:36a lethal beating to one of its heads before miraculously healing itself, which made it
03:40quite the piece of fascination, as after that, quote, all the world wondered at the beast.
03:45The first beast pops up again a few pages later in Revelation 17 when an angel pops its head in
03:51to explain that the creature was a metaphor for mountains, and also a metaphor for kings.
03:56Understandably, the Book of Revelation has a reputation for being filled with metaphors.
04:00It's a metaphor, see?
04:02Next on our tour of mythological biblical creatures is the dragon.
04:06The King James Version of the Bible contains 34 different mentions of these beasts.
04:11Some are just allusions lending themselves to colorful hyperbole,
04:14like when Deuteronomy notes that,
04:16"...wine is the poison of dragons," or this poetic verse from Micah,
04:20"...therefore I will wail and howl, I will go stripped and naked,
04:24I will make a wailing like the dragons and mourning as the owls."
04:28And then there's the prophet Isaiah, who comes riding in with some literal monsters.
04:32According to Chapter 13 of Isaiah, after Babylon falls, its palaces will be infested by dragons,
04:37as well as doleful creatures, owls, and satyrs. Dragons appear again in Chapter 34,
04:43where they take up residence in another city that's smashed by the wrath of the Almighty.
04:47Things get even more intense in the Book of Revelation, where Satan takes the form
04:50of a great red dragon, fighting angels in a heavenly battle royale. In a stunning upset,
04:56one particular angel banishes the creature to the Bottomless Pit for a thousand years.
05:01It's worth noting that the many uses of the word dragon in the King James Bible,
05:0517 of them are derived from the Hebrew word tanin, which is alternately translated as
05:10whale in Genesis 1, verse 21, and sea monsters in Lamentations 4, verse 3.
05:16So, in that sense, the word is a bit of a catch-all for a large and intimidating animal.
05:21"...maps used to say there'd be dragons here. Now they don't."
05:26Yes, there are indeed unicorns mentioned in the Bible. Although, as is the case with several of
05:31these animals, it kind of depends on which version of the Bible you read. When it comes
05:35to translation, the Bible is funny. A lot of it has been interpreted and reinterpreted hundreds
05:40of times in just about every language, even Klingon. Different societal situations at different
05:45points in time have yielded wildly diverse understandings of what the original text meant,
05:50with some words having more than one meaning and others having no direct translation at all.
05:54Sometimes translators just fill in the blanks however they can.
05:58And that's one explanation for why the King James Bible,
06:01first printed in the early 17th century, mentions unicorns not once, but nine separate times.
06:07They're generally used as a point of reference for simile, but it's a little different in the
06:11book of Isaiah. In chapter 34, God is cutting down sinners with a sword filled with blood
06:16in the kidneys of rams. It's foretold that while this happens, unicorns and bulls will
06:21overrun the land and lay the place to waste. Sounds both terrifying and sparkly.
06:26You know a cherub when you see one. Unless, that is, you read the source material,
06:30in which case they skew a little more toward terrifying chimera rather than lovable angel
06:34toddlers. As described in the Book of Ezekiel, the cherubim are an angelic order with a lot
06:39going on physically. They each have four faces, including that of a human, an ox, an eagle,
06:44and a lion. Additionally, they each have four wings, as well as straight legs capped at the
06:49end with shiny bronze bull hooves. They're traditionally given a series of heavenly
06:53duties, perhaps most famously guarding the gates of Eden. In some traditional Jewish teachings,
06:57they're considered the ninth highest order of angels and associated with the task of helping
07:01people move beyond their sins in order to be closer to God. And for fans of raiding lost
07:06things, they're also what's described as being sculpted into the lid of the Ark of the Covenant
07:10in Exodus. As with lots of biblical creatures, the cherubim have shifted visually over time.
07:15As popular art has changed, they became thematically intermingled with the Greek
07:19and Roman god of love and are now visually synonymous with the lovable winged babies
07:24we're all familiar with. In Genesis, shortly after Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden of Eden,
07:29people started getting on with the business of making more people. While a lot of that
07:33went down about the way you'd expect, there were some glaring irregularities as well.
07:38It was a hectic point in the biblical timeline, and a lot of strangeness gets swept under the rug,
07:42at least in terms of the things they teach in Sunday school. Exhibit A in that regard? The Nephilim.
07:48In Genesis 6, it's relayed that the sons of God, usually interpreted as fallen angels,
07:53noticed that the daughters of man were looking rather attractive. The angels got hitched to
07:57human brides, and the resulting progeny were the Nephilim, a race of violent giants.
08:02Just how giant is giant? In the Book of Numbers, they're described as being roughly to people
08:07what people are to grasshoppers. In the Book of Enoch, an apocryphal religious text that
08:11didn't make the final cut of the Bible, it's said that they were nearly a mile high.
08:15They're also considered to have been symbolic of the corruption that God wiped out by the Great
08:19Flood. There are two prominent talking animals in the Bible. The first is fairly well known.
08:25In Genesis, Eve is tempted by a snake with more interest in her nutritional intake than you tend
08:29to see in a standard reptile. The second one you might not have heard of, and it gets a little
08:34strange. In the Book of Numbers, we meet Balaam, a troubled prophet. Long story short, Balaam is on
08:39a road trip, and he really had to convince God about it in order to get the Lord's permission
08:44to go. God gives him the go-ahead, but doesn't feel great about it, so he sends an angel to mess
08:48with the donkey that Balaam is riding. The angel, who's invisible to Balaam, freaks the donkey out,
08:53makes it veer off course, and smacks Balaam against a wall. Balaam gets angry and smacks
08:58the donkey around, and that's when God gives the animal the power of speech. The donkey then asks
09:03Balaam why he's beating him so. So Balaam, apparently unphased that he's now in the
09:07presence of a talking animal, responds,
09:09At this point, the angel shows himself to Balaam and says that if the donkey hadn't
09:17been pulling evasive maneuvers, the angel would have killed Balaam by now. Balaam repents,
09:22goes about his business, and apparently never checks back in on the development that he now
09:26owns a talking barnyard animal.