On Sat, 8 Jan 2000, Carli Feller wrote:

I am a student and I lok for all the information about the mythologic mind of
the word "behemot" (Job 40' 15). Please, send me your answer to:
feller

 Thanks/ 
 Silvia Feller
 
Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2000 10:06:46 -0600 (CST)
From: Dr. Robert Sheldon
To: Carli Feller
Subject: Re: behemot

Sylvia,
 I wish I could be of more help. As I wrote in my introduction to the book
of Job, I don't have the resources to do detailed word studies. Therefore
the approach I take is one of a higher level critique, at the level of
genre rather than at a word study. 
 Having said that, you can ignore the rest of these comments. But being a
physicist by training, I am very aware of the "divide and conquer"
mentality of scholarship. It almost defines the field of physics.  Yet
there are "ill-posed problems" for which this analytical approach fails.
The field of psychology is littered with the monuments of brilliant men
who attempted to use the paradigm of physics in understanding the human
mind. And while we have learned a lot about neurobiology, we still do not
understand the most basic aspects of human experience. 
 Thus taking a word, behemot, and asking how the ancients viewed this
word, is a bit like asking a physicist how he views the word "quark".
Without a very long lecture on particle physics, I cannot begin to explain
what the word means. Physicists don't work with isolated words, they work
with models, with analogies, with entire world views. And after 3
semesters of physics, maybe the beginning physics student will hear the
word "quark". But it will be another 10 semesters before he hears it
again. And graduate work before he uses it. 
  When John Updike uses the word, then, he uses it for what it symbolizes
to the public: the epitome of esoteric knowlege, the deep mysteries of
faith, the gnostic secrets of the initiated.  Perhaps for the beginning
physics student, it holds those mysterious meanings. But long nights of
poring over equations and renormalization groups, gives the intermediate
student a very different picture. A picture of a man half-drowning in the
wreckage of some great ship, holding on to a piece of driftwood, saying "I
christen you 'the Quark'". We are all drowning in this sea of experiences,
in this ocean of equations that we call life, and the physicist tries hard
to make sense of it all, to explain it, to name the animals and thereby
begin the process of taming the wild. 
 I don't know how far along that path we have gone. Just when the last
wilderness was in our grasp, say, 1890, a whole new continent, a new world
was discovered of the quantum and gravity. And we in our hubris, think
that in the year 2000 we have just about tamed that new world of Quantum
and Gravity, when, the truth be told, we have just barely put names on the
most prominent landmarks. 
  Behemot is such a word. It represents governments and civilizations.
Jeremiah used a similar construction as a code word for Babylon. It
represents creation and pre-historic (the oral tradition) stories of being
and existence. It represents nature, in all its whimsy and power (would
you have created the hippopotamus?). It represents all that is not human,
tamed, bred, controlled. Yet it also has personality. Very different from
leviathon. Why the necessity of two such creatures? For the same reason
that physicists have 3 quarks. Experience. Humans, since the human brain is
very conservative, do not invent two words when one will do. Language
shows this simplification over time. Shakespeare had many more words at
his disposal than we have today. Why? Because English was evolving from
the collision of two cultures, Anglo-Saxon and Norman French. If Behemot
is given separately from Leviathon, it must be that there were two
experiences that could not be collapsed into one word. 
  So I challenge you to answer the question: How is Behemot different from
Leviathon? The literature seems to be clear that Leviathon was the
crystallization of Pride. What about Behemot? My own personal view, not
having done much study of the question, is that Behemot possesses the
personality of a hippo. Very dangerous, mostly because they are
unpredictable. Proud people are very dangerous too, but predictable. So
what is it that has the strength of iron, yet without pride? Possibly the
best example I can think of is bureaucracy. But why would an ancient
personalize such a thing? I don't know. On the other hand, the
bureaucracies of the time, ~ 3000BC were probably the first in recorded
history, and the biggest, because this was the first time enough people
were concentrated in such a small area to have a bureaucracy. Maybe they
felt about it the way Updike feels about quarks: the epitome of human
accomplishment.

Well, I've written more than I planned. Let me know what you decide on the
subject, I'm really quite interested in word studies.

 - Rob