RE: Why is there no mention of dinosaurs in the great book?
December 31, 2013 at 2:06 pm
(This post was last modified: December 31, 2013 at 2:09 pm by TudorGothicSerpent.)
I don't think it's impossible that the ancient Jews were aware of the existence of fossilized animal remains, or even that they mentioned them in the Bible. I just think that the way they probably mentioned them wouldn't exactly make Biblical literalists comfortable.
You find similar myths in most cultures, including the nearby Greeks (who had their legend of the gigantomachia between the gods and the giants), along with stories about gigantic animals. There's a pretty good chance that the idea started as an accretion of stories around a basic truth. People have probably been digging up the bones of enormous, dead animals like dinosaurs and more recent giant mammals for years, and interpreting them through a naive lens as giants who lived in a mythological past of either monsters or heroes. There's even a possibility that leviathan and behemoth could have actually started out as dinosaurs. Of course, the problem with this from a literalist standpoint is that they started out that way and then turned into myths, and exist in the Bible only as imagined monsters, breathing fire in the depths of the ocean rather than resting peacefully as skulls in limestone hills.
Genesis 6:4 Wrote:There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.
You find similar myths in most cultures, including the nearby Greeks (who had their legend of the gigantomachia between the gods and the giants), along with stories about gigantic animals. There's a pretty good chance that the idea started as an accretion of stories around a basic truth. People have probably been digging up the bones of enormous, dead animals like dinosaurs and more recent giant mammals for years, and interpreting them through a naive lens as giants who lived in a mythological past of either monsters or heroes. There's even a possibility that leviathan and behemoth could have actually started out as dinosaurs. Of course, the problem with this from a literalist standpoint is that they started out that way and then turned into myths, and exist in the Bible only as imagined monsters, breathing fire in the depths of the ocean rather than resting peacefully as skulls in limestone hills.
