 just generally upfront. I don't see any evidence in the Bible for dinosaurs. I don't see how biblical writers would have known about dinosaurs unless they ran across a skeleton or something like that. But again, how would they process that? They'd probably call it a dragon. I don't see any evidence for living dinosaurs during the biblical period or anything like that. So, you know, having said that, I don't think the biblical material really pertains to what we would think of as dinosaurs at all anyway. And here's why it gets really complicated. You have this term, tonine, or toninim. Both of them can actually be plural endings and Semitic, but I don't want to digress into that. These things, these creatures, we'll just call them, are mentioned in connection with several themes in the Old Testament. Now, the question sort of situates one of them. Genesis 121 is obviously a creation theme. Now, before we even hit the language, we need to back up and think about Genesis 1. There are a number of scholars. It's not so prevalent now as it was, oh, I don't know, a few decades ago. But because you have creation episodes, creation descriptions outside of Genesis 1 in the Bible that have God slaying a dragon or a sea monster. Psalm 74 is probably the best example here. Because you have those scenes, that sort of triggered a whole way of approaching all creation texts in Genesis at least one time. And the reason is this. If you look at Psalm 74, the notion was, look, here the God of Israel is slaying this great sea beast and that's associated with creation language. It's also, as I'll point out in a few minutes, associated with Exodus language. But let's stick with creation now, this one category. Since God is slaying this beast and that is associated with the act of creation, this is just like certain Babylonian creation stories. The biggest example would be Anuma Elish, where in the end, Marduk slays a great sea dragon and chops the carcass. It splits it in half and out of one half, he makes the sea and the other half makes the dry land. The sky and the dry land and so you've got this destruction of this beast and out of that comes the heavens and the earth. And in the Babylonian story, Marduk, when he does this, brings order out of chaos because the sea dragon, the sea beast was just making life miserable or making creation impossible. And so Marduk wanted to make the earth habitable for humans. And so this beast has to be slain and then the heavens and earth that humans will inhabit and experience are created thereby. So it's this story of bringing order out of chaos and the Babylonian material uses, again, as a chaos symbol, a great sea beast. Now, the reason why you see that not only in Babylonian material but also in lots of other material is that the sea was otherworldly to an ancient Near Eastern person, really any ancient person. And it's because it isn't where people live. You can't live in the sea. You can't live in the sea. The sea is chaotic. It's untamable. It's wild. It's threatening. You'll die if you're not on a boat, that kind of thing. It's unpredictable. The sea was an otherworldly place. You'll actually get Egyptian texts that talk about smaller bodies of water on the periphery of their boundaries. And the Egyptians will actually refer to bodies of water like the sea, which is the end. They'll equate the sea with the afterlife or the netherworld because to them it spoke of unpredictability and death and humans can't live there. That kind of thing. So it was just an otherworldly place. Now, when you're out on the sea in a boat and you see big animals, whether they're whales or sharks or whatever it is, you tend to associate those things, these huge creatures that, again, don't live on land. They're not things you normally see, but they live in this otherworldly place. They lend themselves to, again, being portrayals, symbolic portrayals of that place. And that's why you have, in the ancient Near East, a lot of this kind of symbology, great sea creatures that represent chaos and death and disorder and all this kind of stuff. Well, Inuma Eilish, the Babylonian story, again, since the supposition was that, and you get this in biblical literature, you get it in Mesopotamian literature, you get it in Egyptian literature, that before there was any land to inhabit, for human habitation, there was just water. And so the primeval mound rises up out of the water, either at the command of the God or is created by the God from some preexisting material. In this case, it's the carcass, at least half the carcass of this great sea beast. So Marduk brings order out of chaos and creates dry land for human habitation. And of course, Marduk creates people too and all that kind of stuff. So since scholars were familiar with these stories, when they would look at a passage like Psalm 74, they thought, well, that's really a good match for this whole idea. And then they'd go back to Genesis 1 and ask, well, is this stuff in Genesis 1? And what you get is you get really two things. You get Genesis 121, the reference to the Tani Neem. And you also get the word Tahom, which is in most English translations translated the deep. Now Tahom, again, a few decades ago, this was accepted as a coherent argument. It's not so much now and I'll explain why. But Tahom was thought to be the Hebrew equivalent of Tiamat, which was the name of the sea dragon in the Babylonian Anuma Ailish story. And so the supposition was Tahom and Tani Neem. There's no battle going on in Genesis 1. And so what the writer of Genesis 1 is trying to convey is that when the God of Israel, who's the real creator, started doing his thing. These forces were already held in check. There was no need for a battle. They were submissive and bound. And so it was a theological polemic. It was a theological slant to how the Israelite viewed creation that our God doesn't even need to have this fight. Now, of course, that doesn't work in Psalm 74. But again, this was the thinking. Now, nowadays, what you have is in Psalm 74, the reference to Leviathan there. And you also get Leviathan referred to in Psalm 74. Let me just go to the passage or find the passage here and read it for people. Psalm 74, beginning in verse 12, the psalmist says, Yet God my king is from of old, working salvation in the midst of the earth. You divided the sea by your might. You broke the heads of the sea monsters. And there's our word Tani Neem on or in the waters. You crushed the heads of Leviathan. You gave him as food for the creatures of the wilderness. And that's odd. I thought we were in the sea. Now we're in the wilderness all of a sudden because in verse 14, it's going to transition to Exodus language. And then it's going to go back to creation language. You get to verse 16. We're establishing the heavenly lights in the sun, fixing the boundaries of the earth. Again, this is language right out of Genesis one. So there's something going on there. But to get back to the point, people looked at this and thought, well, Leviathan, you know, that doesn't look anything like to home. It doesn't look like anything like Tiamat. And, you know, what's going on here? Well, in 1929, the Ugaritic material was discovered. Okay. Again, prior to that discovery, everything was sort of Babylonian oriented when it came to Genesis, at least in the academic world. And, you know, it took a little while for Ugaritic material to get translated and sort of become, you know, a scholarly focus. But the point is that nowadays people look at Psalm 74 and they don't see the Babylonian story. They see the Ugaritic story because in the Ugaritic story, you have the same terms. You have Tanun or Tanunah. Again, it's the same thing as the Tanunim. And you also have Lotan or Liyu Yatan, which is the same thing as Leviathan in the Hebrew Bible. And that story, the Ugaritic story, is not about the creation of the world. It's about who is supreme in the divine council. And in the Babylonian story, you read through that the Baal cycle. The Baal eventually emerges as the top dog, the vice regent under, still under El's authority. But he becomes the chosen co-ruler among all the other gods. And he does so by destroying and defeating Litanu, you know, winning this battle. And so since the terminology is so close, scholars looked at it and thought, well, you know, this is such a close match. It's got to be this instead of the Babylonian stuff. And then they took that back to Genesis 1 and said, you know, this is probably not, you know, aimed at the Babylonians. It's probably, again, a reference to, in this case, Canaanite religion, the Baal stuff. That, again, to home, there's actually a Ugaritic word for that that means the recesses of the deep, just like our English translations of to home would have, you know, the deep. So that made sense. But it was also the place where, again, these sea creatures lived. And since the sea creatures, Tananim, is sort of used to as an equivalent to Leviathan in Psalm 74. The idea was that, hey, Genesis 1 is really describing Leviathan, you know, Litanu already subdued by the God of Israel. And so the focus of the comparison changed in that respect. So that was a long way of explaining how an ancient Near Eastern person would look at this. They're not seeing dinosaurs like you and I would think of them. This is about chaos language and chaos symbology that is drawn from, you know, the other worldly place known as the sea or the ocean. But the whole point of their stories is, again, things like who restrains chaos? Who is the king of the gods? And so when the biblical writer starts taking this kind of material and swapping in Yahweh, the point is theological. It's not paleontological or biological. It's a slap in the face of what a Canaanite would believe. If you have a New Geridic person or a Canaanite person happen to read or hear the biblical story of creation, they would get it instantly that you're dissing Baal. You're dissing our God. You're saying your God's the real Creator. You're saying your God's better. And the first 11 chapters of Genesis are just cluttered with that kind of thing. There is still a lot of Mesopotamian stuff. When my book Unseen Realm comes out, the whole Genesis 6 theme is cast against the Apkalu from Babylon, these semi-divine giant figures and all that kind of stuff. Genesis 1 through 11 takes swipes at just about everything in the religious world of the ancient Near East. And you even get Egyptian stuff. The whole idea of creation by the spoken word actually is a swipe at the Egyptian god Ta. Because Ta's Memphite theology in Egyptian literature is the only other place in the ancient world, ancient Near Eastern world, ancient Mediterranean world that describes creation by the spoken word, by the breath of the mouth. And so it's a very deliberate swipe at that point of that story, of that theology. The biblical writer wants to make sure that they're hitting all the bases, essentially that they're not going to leave any other rival claim of any other deity untouched. They're going to hit them all. And that's what they do in the Genesis story. So you have creation themes for this dragon language or the sea beast language. And you have, again, what I guess I could describe as sort of theological polemic going on. But the third thing you have is you have historical enemies of the people of God, Pharaoh and Nebuchadnezzar are both described with this terminology, either Leviathan or Tonyneem or something like that. In other words, they are painted with the same terminology. Again, because now the Pharaoh, the oppressing Pharaoh and Nebuchadnezzar, we all know what he did, these are the prime enemies of the people of God. They are the embodied forces of chaos against God's people. And that's why this language is attributed to them. Can all of us think in the audience of a New Testament example where the great enemy of God is associated in some way with a dragon? Hello, the book of Revelation. And a lot of that draws on Isaiah 24-27, which is apocalyptic literature in Isaiah that, guess what? The day of the Lord comes and Leviathan is finally destroyed. I mean, there's sort of a network of ideas. This is a network of ideas that tracks through certain portions of the Old Testament and certain portions of the New Testament. And so that is how I view all of this such language because it's bigger than the Bible itself. You will find this sort of thing in religious texts, in mythologies across the ancient world. And I don't think coincidentally, they're drawn from sort of the same bag of tricks. It's the sea and the creatures in the sea because, again, that's just a horrifying, terrifying place. You are not safe when you're out on the sea. It's unpredictable, it's wild, it's untamed, it's chaotic. You could die real fast. And again, because of who they were, sort of a, you know, we can look at it and say it's kind of primitive thinking. Okay, well, so what if it is? But I mean, this is the way they thought about these things and the way they conveyed certain ideas. And so that's how I approach this sort of monster language in the Old Testament. And I think that's the way it needs to be approached because it's consistent both within and outside the Bible. The language gets picked up, you know, in the Second Temple period. This is where you get, you know, it gets tied to all sorts of things. You know, the Oroboros, you know, the serpent with the, you know, its tail in its mouth and you get into rabbinic literature and you get Leviathan and behemoth imagery in that sort of literature. Again, really doing the same thing. You know, the enemies of God get portrayed by these things that you get in certain texts. This is kind of interesting. But in certain texts, when Leviathan or the beast, you know, and just look at the terminology, Revelation, the beast, okay, that comes from the sea, what a surprise. And of course, at the end of Revelation, there is no more sea. This is why chaos is done with. There is no more disorder. You get imagery of this great like divine banquet, you know, the marriage supper of the Lamb is the way the New Testament has it. Well, there's Jewish rabbinic stuff that have, you know, sort of the end of, you know, when the day of the Lord comes, there's this divine banquet. And you'll get some texts that guess what served at dinner. It's Leviathan. I mean, again, it's this imagery of, it's done now. This beast is finally dead, like really dead. And it's never going to come back again. We'll never have to worry about this again, because now we're in a perfect place. We're in the New Eden. There is no threat of this anymore. So it actually works itself out, you know, into texts. Jewish and Christian outside the Bible in some real interesting ways.