Does the Bible Say Mythical Creatures Exist?

Welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.

Welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers Apologist and speaker, Trent Horn. And today I want to talk about monsters, ah, real monsters, but more the ones that are alleged to inhabit the pages of the Bible and show, therefore, that the Bible is merely a collection of human writings devoid of any divine inspiration. But before we do that, I need to warn you about the scariest monster of them all, non-subscriberist. He feeds on YouTube videos but never subscribes to any of the creators, and that prevents those channels from growing. So don’t be a monster. Hit that subscribe button, and of course, support us at trenthornpodcast.com.

All right, so biblical monsters and related mythical creatures. That’s what we’re going to talk about today here on the podcast. So let’s get started with a more benign mythical creature that’s alleged to be in the Bible, the unicorn. This one comes up a lot in atheist memes about the Bible. Here are a few of them. Here’s one, unicorns are mentioned nine times in the Bible. Cats are mentioned zero times, and that’s all you need to know about the Bible, or unicorns because the Bible tells me so. And the Bible brags that God is strong like a unicorn, which actually kind of makes sense because unicorns don’t exist either.

The problem with these memes is that they focus usually on one translation of the Bible to make the case that the Bible talks about unicorns, and that’s the 1611 King James Version or the KJV. This often happens because atheists like to use Steve Wells’ Skeptic’s Annotated Bible, which is derived from the King James Version. In that translation of the Bible, the unicorn is depicted as a symbol of strength and wild power. Numbers 23:22 in the KJV says, “God brought the Israelites out of Egypt. He hath as it were, the strength of a unicorn.”

In Job 39:9-10, God points out Job’s human limits, and he says the following, “Will the unicorn be willing to serve thee, or abide by thy crib? Canst thou bind the unicorn with his band in the furrow?” The Hebrew word the KJV translates as unicorn is re’em, which modern scholars identify with something like an auroch or a large horned cow that is now extinct. The ancient Assyrians also call these animals by a similar name. They called them the rimu. So how did this Hebrew word re’em become unicorn in the King James Version of the Bible?

Well, the translators of the Septuagint, this is the ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament, use the Greek word monokerōs or monoceros, literally, one horn in the place of the Hebrew word re’em. In the fifth century, St. Jerome translated the Septuagint into Latin Vulgate, and he used the Latin equivalent of monoceros or monoceros, the Latin equivalent being unicornuus. Eventually this word became unicorn in English, but why did the Septuagint translators use a word that literally meant one horn instead of something like wild ox?

Well, one theory is that the translators of the Septuagint may have been thinking of another animal that also fits the description found in passages like Numbers 23:22. The first century Roman naturalist, Pliny the Elder, described a real animal from India that was called a monoceros or monokerōs, monoceros. This is his description. “It has the head of the stag, the feet of the elephant, and the tail of the boar. While the rest of the body is like that of the horse. It makes a deep lowing noise and has a single black horn, which projects from the middle of its forehead, two cubits in length. This animal, it is said, cannot be taken alive.”

Now, if we allow some leeway in Pliny’s description, which you have to do with ancient descriptions of unique creatures, we could identify this creature as the modern Indian rhinoceros. Monoceros means one horn and rhinoceros, rinokeros means nose horn. A rhinoceros would actually make sense in these biblical passages as well, because unlike unicorns, they are known for being very strong beasts, and they can’t be domesticated. In fact, the Douay-Rheims Bible renders the passage this way, “Shall the rhinoceros be willing to serve thee or will he stay at thy crib? Canst thou bind the rhinoceros with thy thong to plow, or will he break the clods of the valleys after thee?” But in order to remain faithful to the original Hebrew language and to avoid confusion with the medieval concept of a unicorn, most modern translations of the Bible render the Hebrew word in these passages, wild ox and not unicorn, one horn or rhinoceros.

All right, here’s the next monster mythical creature we have, the cockatrice. This creature is mentioned several times in the King James Version’s, translations of the books of the prophets. Jeremiah 8:17 says, “For behold, I will send serpents, cockatrices, among you, which will not be charmed, and they shall bite you, saith the Lord.” The Bible critic, Jason Long, writes in his book, Biblical Nonsense, “The prophet Isaiah informs us that a cockatrice, a mythical creature able to kill its victim with a casual glance will arise from a serpent, Isaiah 14:29. What tangible evidence do we have to believe that a creature with this incredible ability has ever existed?” However, Isaiah never mentions the cockatrice in the original Hebrew text, and he doesn’t talk about this creature having supernatural powers. Although allusions to the cockatrice can be traced back to Pliny the Elder, it was the dissident Catholic, John Wycliffe, who first used that term in 1382 in his popular translation of the Bible.

This was later used in the 1535 Coverdale Bible, which may have been the source of the King James Version’s use of the word. The Hebrew word used in passages like Isaiah 11:8 and others, it just means poisonous serpent. Today, most modern translations used the word adder in these passages because it’s more faithful to the original Hebrew. Recently, I wrote a book actually called When Protestants Argue Like Atheists, but I’m tempted now to write a book called When Atheists Argue Like Protestants. You see a small subset of Protestants called King James Only advocates believe that the 1611 King James Bible is the only valid or even the only inspired translation of the Bible. Some of them treat the English text of the KJV as if we’re on par or superior to the original Hebrew and Greek texts of scripture, and there are some atheists who do the same.

You see this in the work of atheist, David Mills, who writes the following, “In the newer, modern language translations of the Bible, these ridiculous passages of scripture, like those mentioning the unicorn or the cockatrice, have been dishonestly excised, rewritten, or edited beyond recognition from their original translation in the King James.” Of course, the King James Version is not the original translation of the Bible or the one that scholars use to determine the meaning of the biblical text. They use the ancient Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic text. It’s just one translation that was made thousands of years later. And scholars point out when it gets stuff wrong.

All right, next up we have the dragons. So in some parts of the Bible, the word dragon is used as a metaphor to refer to the devil, like in Revelation 20:2, or even to human beings like Pharaoh. He’s called a dragon in Ezekiel 29:3. But in other passages, the word dragon appears to refer to some kind of actual animal or creature. In the King James Version, Jeremiah 10:22 says, “Behold, the noise of the bruit is come, and a great commotion out of the north country, to make the cities of Judah desolate, and a den of dragons.”

The word dragons is also used in the Catholic Douay-Rheims translation of the scripture verse, but the Hebrew word that is translated as dragon here is tannin, and that can mean serpent or dragon. The word tannin though, comes from the root word tan, which means jackal. So modern translations usually render the text based on the root word because it better fits the context of these passages. So the RSV Catholic Edition translates Jeremiah 10:22 this way, “Behold, it comes, a great commotion out of the north country, to make the cities of Judah a desolation, a lair of jackals.”

If an ancient city were destroyed in battle, we would expect scavenging animals like jackals to inhabit it and feast on the dead bodies that were left in the midst of the desolation. However, in other instances, the word dragon in scripture seems to refer to a mythical creature, not a real animal like a jackal. Psalm 74:13 says, of God, “You divided the sea by your might. You broke the heads of the dragons on the waters.” But this does not mean the Holy Spirit is asserting, through the inspired author, that dragons really exist. The Psalms are poetic literature, and the author was comparing Yahweh’s strength to that of other creatures that were considered strong in the ancient world. If I say that Jesus can beat Superman, Omni-Man and Homelander all at the same time, that is true, but it doesn’t mean I think those three fictional characters actually exist.

Another example would be the Bible’s description of a creature called Leviathan. In Psalm 104, this word probably refers to a whale, but in other passages, the word refers to a mythical creature. So Leviathan is similar to the word beast. It has a very wide semantic range. So in Job 41:19-21, it says, of Leviathan, “Out of his mouth go flaming torches, sparks of fire leap forth, out of his nostrils comes forth smoke. As from a boiling pot and burning rushes, his breath kindles coals and a flame comes forth from his mouth.” And Psalm 74:14 tells us that God in the primeval world crushed the heads of Leviathan. “You gave him his food for the creatures of the wilderness.” And Isaiah 27:1 says, “At the end of time, the Lord with his hard and great and strong sword will punish Leviathan, the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent, and he will slay the dragon that is in the sea.”

Now, this could be metaphorical or allegorical referring to Satan because Satan is called a dragon or to some other human foes. But Bible scholar Mark Smith has observed that this could refer to these other fictional creatures, but it’s done in a way to exalt Yahweh over other gods, irrespective of these creatures actually existing. Because in other ancient cultures, they made beasts like the Leviathan monsters, like Leviathan were equal to their gods and were actually threatening to these other Canaanite and pagan deities.

But the Hebrews were different. They described creatures as Leviathan, not as the enemy of God or a threat to God, but as God’s pets or as God’s recreational animals. To the Hebrews, God had complete control over these creatures, which reflected the Jewish view that God has complete control over everything in the universe. In his book The Bible Among the Myths, John Oswalt argued that the writers of scripture were using, “A self-conscious appropriation of the language of myth for historical and literary purposes, not mythical ones.”

The Bible’s depiction of fantastic dragon creatures like Leviathan may also have come about when ancient people like the Israelites discovered dinosaur fossils. All they would’ve known from examining these unearthed bones was that they came from huge beasts or creatures with really big teeth. In City of God, St. Augustine even describes finding a fossilized tooth, and he attributed this to an ancient giant based on the thinking of ancient Roman scientists like Pliny the Younger. He writes the following, “I myself, along with some others, saw on the shore at Utica, a man’s molar tooth of such a size that if it were cut down into teeth such as we have, a hundred I fancy could have been made out of it, but that I believe belonged to some giant. For though the bodies of ordinary men were then larger than ours, the giants surpassed all in stature.”

So the Bible is without error in what it asserts. Even though God allowed the ancient authors to retain pre-scientific views about things like astronomy or zoology, the Bible may describe these views, but the Holy Spirit is not asserting them as that which we are supposed to believe. So there is nothing problematic in the Holy Spirit using the human authors of the Bible and allowing them to retain their pre-scientific worldviews in order to communicate or assert through the text, the following message, “Whatever these huge animals were, and no matter when they lived, our God, Yahweh is stronger than them.”

All right, well, I hope that this was helpful for you all today, and if you want to learn more about how to answer Bible difficulties, definitely check out my book. Hard Sayings: A Catholic Approach to Answering Bible Difficulties. Thank you all so much, and I hope you have a very blessed day.

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