20 Biblical Beasts And Supernatural Beings That Aren’t What You Think

During his exile in Babylon, the prophet Ezekiel had a vision around 593 BCE, in which he saw four “living creatures” beside the river Kebar, each with four faces (human, lion, ox, eagle), four wings, legs of bronze, and a body covered in eyes, accompanied by strange wheels within wheels. Ezekiel calls these beings cherubim. It seems that Ezekiel might have borrowed from depictions of the winged sphinx and bull-figures on the gates of palaces and temples across Mesopotamia. None of them were babies, though!

In Job 41, Leviathan is a sea creature whose armor-like scales no man could subdue. The intent of the description was to provoke wonder, not to serve as a zoological treatise on some real-life animal. In Psalm 104:26, Leviathan is one of God’s creations, made to sport in the sea. In Isaiah 27:1, Leviathan is used metaphorically to describe enemy nations which God will destroy. In subsequent rabbinic literature, Leviathan is described as a female whom God will salt and store away for a feast in the world to come.

The seven-headed Sea Beast of Revelation (c. 95 CE), whose body was like a leopard’s, whose feet were like a bear’s, and whose mouth was like a lion’s mouth, receives its power from “the Dragon” (Satan, as described elsewhere in Revelation) and is given authority to wage war against the saints. It is widely regarded by scholars as a coded insult aimed at Rome. John gives it the number 666 (Rev. 13:18), a gematria code that several scholars believe represents “Neron Kaisar,” or Emperor Nero. An early manuscript of Revelation, Papyrus 115, gives the number 616, corresponding to the Latin spelling of the emperor’s name.

In Chapter 13 of Revelation comes the Second Beast who arises from the earth. He looks like a lamb but speaks like a dragon. Rather than being a ruler, this beast is characterized as a deceiver. By using “signs” that he is permitted to do, he deceives those who dwell on the earth into worshiping the Sea Beast (the Sea Beast with seven heads in Revelation 13) and taking his infamous “mark of the beast.” The Second Beast could be a reference to those in the imperial cult apparatus who were pressuring people to participate in the cult; he was the Sea Beast’s propagandist.

Revelation 12 describes a Great Red Dragon with seven heads, ten horns, and seven crowns, who drags a third of the stars in the sky down to earth. Traditionally, scholars interpreted the passage as referring to fallen angelic beings, but this time, we actually get a direct answer to what the dragon represents: it’s “that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan.” (The book was written around 95 CE, during a period of Roman persecution of Christians.)

In Job 40, Behemoth is described as “the chief of the ways of God,” a huge land animal whose tail is “like a cedar” and whose bones are “like tubes of bronze.” The writer goes on to say that no one can approach him with a sword except the one who made him. From the context, it’s clear that all this was exaggerated language to bring Job back down to size. No dinosaurs required.

Job and Numbers both talk about a re’em, a horned beast that no man can subdue or capture. Linguistic evidence, including an Akkadian cognate, rimu, shows it was probably a two-horned wild ox, the now-extinct aurochs. However, when the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek in the 3rd century BCE, translators rendered it as “one-horned.” In Latin it became unicornis, and from there, in English, via the King James Bible, the aurochs became a unicorn.

Daniel 7, written circa 167-164 BCE during the time of Greek oppression against Judea, features four creatures rising out of the churning sea: a winged lion, a hungry bear, a four-headed leopard, and an unidentified animal with ten horns and teeth of iron. Modern scholars interpret these as representing Babylon, Media, Persia, and Greece, while traditionalists understand the final creature to be Rome. Both readings survive.

The locusts from Revelation 9 pour out of the bottomless pit in great swarms. They have the faces of men, the teeth of lions, the tails of scorpions, and gold crowns on their heads. They are led by a being called Abaddon in Hebrew and Apollyon (meaning “destroyer”) in Greek. They do not kill people, but torment them for five months, the lifespan of a desert locust swarm from the start of spring until late summer.

Isaiah writes in about 740 BCE that six-winged Seraphim hover around God’s throne, two of whose wings cover their faces, two of which cover their feet, and two are used for flying. One places a burning coal upon Isaiah’s lips. (Seraph means something like “burning” and, in other contexts, refers to poisonous snakes; one can hear a serpent’s hiss in the best-known angelic word in the Bible.)

In Hebrew poetry, there is a primordial chaos dragon that is defeated and crushed by God at the moment of creation, and whose name is Rahab (see Psalm 89, Isaiah 51). This is not the Rahab who hid the Israelite spies in Jericho; these are two different Hebrew words that both translate to Rahab in English. Later on, the prophets used the chaos dragon’s name as a mock moniker for Egypt when they retold the Exodus.

According to Genesis 1:21, God made “the great sea monsters” in his ordered, good creation on the fifth day. This might have been a subtle jibe at other ancient accounts, like those found in Ugaritic texts (circa 1200 BCE) about the sea serpent Lotan being an adversary destroyed by the storm god Baal. However, in this account, they’re simply another creature to show up on time. There’s no fight involved.

In Leviticus 16, when God describes how to observe Yom Kippur, the high priest chooses two goats by lot. He kills one on the altar and sends the other away, “for Azazel,” to wander free in the wilderness. The Torah does not define Azazel, whether it’s a demon in the desert, a particular rock, or the wilderness as a whole. Later, the Book of Enoch describes Azazel as a fallen angel who is bound and buried in a barren place.

Isaiah 34:14 describes the wastelands of Edom as being populated by “the beasts of the night,” including lilit (translated variously as “screech owl” and “night monster”) named after Mesopotamian lilitu, a type of demon. More than a millennium later, the medieval work known as the Alphabet of Ben Sira would expand on this single term and use it to create the myth of Lilith, the first rebellious wife of Adam.

Leviticus refers to “se’irim,” hairy, goat-like demons involved in occult practices and living in “desolate places.” Isaiah does as well. (Some English translations render these creatures as satyrs, but that is a late borrowing from Greek, and they predate any connection to Greek satyrs.) This is from an older Near Eastern idea that wastelands are the abodes of impure spirits.

In Isaiah and Jeremiah, the Hebrew word for venomous viper, tsepha, appears in both prophets’ speeches of judgment. In older English translations, like the King James Version, tsepha is rendered “cockatrice,” a creature from medieval mythology that was half snake, half rooster, and was said to kill with a single glance. There’s no mention of any such creature in the original text. A real-life serpent was simply given a fantasy makeover in translation.

In Numbers 21, the Israelites in the wilderness are bitten by “fiery serpents” as divine retribution, and Moses makes a bronze serpent on a pole; whoever looks at it after being bitten survives. Isaiah also mentions winged serpents as a real danger in the Negev. Both are actual references to snakes; both use a word that shares a root with Isaiah’s Seraphim (the six-winged angelic beings), and that’s it.

Two psalms mention zīz sadāy, which modern-day scholars interpret as “creatures of the field,” and centuries later, rabbis writing in the Babylonian Talmud turned that mysterious term into Ziz, the mythic giant bird. It was built to counter the Leviathan and the Behemoth, said to have a wingspan wide enough to obscure the sun. There’s no mention of Ziz by that name anywhere in the Hebrew Bible.

Tobit is a deuterocanonical book, included in Catholic and Orthodox Bibles but not in the Jewish Bible or many Protestant Bibles. In it, young Tobias takes the advice of the Archangel Raphael and catches a giant fish in the Tigris River. He burns the fish’s heart and liver as incense to drive off a demon named Asmodeus and uses its gall to cure his father Tobit’s blindness, yet the fish has no name.

According to the Book of Jonah, God dispatches a “great fish” to eat Jonah after he is cast into the sea by sailors in a storm. After three days and nights within the belly of the fish, it vomits Jonah up on dry land. Although this sounds like a whale, the Bible doesn’t specify. That association was created later on, perhaps from the Greek word ketos, which translates loosely to “large sea creature.”

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