The Phrase Today
"A behemoth" means an entity of enormous, apparently unstoppable power and scale - a corporate giant, a government bureaucracy, a military machine, an industrial complex. The word is used in business journalism to describe dominant companies: "the behemoth that is Amazon," "a retail behemoth." It connotes not just size but a certain lumbering, overwhelming magnitude that makes opposition seem futile. Unlike "Goliath" (which implies the possibility of defeat by a small opponent), "behemoth" suggests something almost beyond human scale.
Biblical Origin
Job 40:15-24 (KJV): "Behold now behemoth, which I made with thee; he eateth grass as an ox. Lo now, his strength is in his loins, and his force is in the navel of his belly. He moveth his tail like a cedar: the sinews of his stones are wrapped together. His bones are as strong pieces of brass; his bones are like bars of iron. He is the chief of the ways of God." God describes the creature to Job as evidence of divine creative power that surpasses human understanding. The context is God's response to Job from the whirlwind - a catalogue of creation's wonders designed to overwhelm Job's complaint about divine justice with the sheer scale of divine creative achievement.
What Was Behemoth?
Scholars have proposed several identifications. The most common traditional identification is the hippopotamus: behemoth eats grass (hippos do graze on land), lives near rivers (40:21-22), and is enormously strong. The cedar-tail detail is problematic - hippo tails are short and stubby - and this has led some to propose a crocodile or elephant instead. A minority of scholars, following some ancient Jewish sources, identify behemoth and its companion Leviathan (Job 41) as primordial cosmic creatures - symbols of chaos that God has subdued in creation. In this reading, behemoth is not a zoological species but a theological symbol of the forces of disorder that God holds in check.
Thomas Hobbes's Behemoth
Thomas Hobbes wrote two major political works: Leviathan (1651), which described the sovereign state as the sea-beast that keeps order, and Behemoth (written 1668, published 1682), which analyzed the English Civil War as the land-beast of chaos unleashed. Hobbes's use of both biblical creatures as political symbols gave them philosophical currency far beyond their biblical origin. Leviathan is the state-as-order; Behemoth is civil war as primal disorder. This Hobbesian frame shaped how English political philosophy thought about sovereign power and the chaos it must contain.
How the KJV Cemented It
The KJV kept the Hebrew word behemoth (a plural of intensity, meaning something like "the great beast" or "beastly power") rather than translating it into a descriptive English phrase. This decision - to transliterate rather than translate - gave English a new word. Because the word was retained, it remained available for metaphorical deployment in any context requiring a term for overwhelming natural or institutional scale. Had the KJV translated it as "hippopotamus" or "river-horse," the word would not have acquired its current cultural currency.
Semantic Drift
In Job, behemoth is presented as a creature of divine craftsmanship - "which I made with thee" emphasizes that it is a created being, subject to its maker, not a rival to God. Its power is therefore ultimately bounded. In modern English, "behemoth" implies overwhelming, potentially ungovernable power without the theological qualification of divine sovereignty. The word has lost the theological frame that made behemoth's power non-threatening (God made it and controls it) and retains only the connotation of overwhelming scale.
Historical Usage
Hobbes's Behemoth established the word in English political discourse. Milton uses both Leviathan and Behemoth in Paradise Lost to describe the rebel angels, connecting the cosmic creatures to Satanic chaos. In the nineteenth century, "behemoth" began appearing in journalism and literature to describe industrial and commercial entities of overwhelming scale - the railway companies, the industrial trusts, the colonial corporations that defined Victorian capitalism. J.P. Morgan's banking empire, Standard Oil, the great railroad companies - all were described in behemoth terms by their critics.
Cross-Linguistic Equivalents
Hebrew behemoth was transliterated rather than translated in the Septuagint (therion, beast, is used more generically), and most European translations either transliterate behemoth or identify it with a specific animal. German Behemoth and French béhémoth are direct transliterations carrying the same metaphorical sense. The word has been partially internationalized through English business and political journalism, appearing in translated form in discussions of dominant corporations and institutions. Unlike "Goliath" (which is used as frequently or more), "Behemoth" retains a slightly more archaic, formal character.
Misconceptions
The most significant misconception is that behemoth is inherently evil or a symbol of chaos. In Job, God describes behemoth with evident pride - "he is the chief of the ways of God" - as an example of divine creative power. The creature is magnificent, not malevolent. A second misconception is that behemoth and Leviathan are the same creature. They are described in consecutive speeches (Job 40 and 41) as distinct creatures: behemoth is a land animal associated with rivers, Leviathan a sea creature with fire-breathing capabilities. Third, many assume the word is Greek or Latin in origin; it is a Hebrew plural form that entered English directly through the KJV's practice of retaining untranslated biblical proper nouns and technical terms.