Two of the major roles in the story are reptiles. Well, Satan is represented as a reptile, but leviathan also has a starring scene. For the entire 41st chapter of the Bible’s book of Job, God is speaking about nothing but this sea monster and the lessons we can learn from him. In fact, these are God’s concluding remarks and Job agreed that this was sufficient prompt for repentance. As did the 41st chapter, this blog post will also focus on leviathan.
God speaks of leviathan as a monstrously huge, fire-breathing, invincible reptile. In legends and mythology, the word for this would be dragon. The scientific name might be dinosaur, but this term does not strictly include all large reptiles. Whether leviathan was a dinosaur or not, he certainly was a terrible lizard.
For the story, we are using some back-story to explain our model for this monster. To start with, we will address this idea, expressed in some Bible edition footnotes, that leviathan was a crocodile. When was the last time you saw a fire-breathing crocodile? OK, so while this is clearly an error, it may not be as far off as it first seems. If you significantly increase the size, add a fire-breathing feature and extend the armour plating, then this could fit the Biblical description. What is interesting is that there is fossil evidence of extremely large crocodiles, called sarcosuchus, that many Biblical creationists think may be a good candidate for leviathan. He even has a large bulb on the end of his snout, which could house the chemical factory for igniting the flame. You can find this mentioned on AiG’s website as well as the book “Dragons of the Deep” by Carl Wieland, published by Master Books, and the video “Dragons or Dinosaurs” produced by Cloud Ten Pictures.
To this we have added to our model a methane chamber and gastrolith dust. When circus performers breathe fire, they spit some flammable substance out of their mouth, igniting the stream with a flaming torch. Our leviathan has a methane chamber for collecting digestive gases, to be expelled at will from the mouth. In conjunction, “his neesings” would ignite the expelled methane stream. This concept is reminiscent of the bombardier beetles’ chemical chambers. Also, many animals of this type have gastroliths, which are stones in the leading section of the digestive tract. These stones would rub together, over time, making sand and dust. As the methane is expelled, some of the dust would be caught up and also expelled, thus being super-heated, forming sparks.
God talks about leviathan for quite some time, and this will be quoted, by God, directly from the Bible, in the movie. So, this will give us ample opportunity to show off the attributes of this magnificent creature.
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