Behemoth, the Beast of a Thousand Hills, Roars in Tammuz

The hills move when it breathes. Not the wind in the grass, the hills themselves, the whole green spine of a thousand mountains rising and settling under a weight that has lain there since the sixth morning of the world. A traveler who climbed high enough to see it would not understand what he was looking at. He would think the range itself was alive, that the earth had a chest, that the valleys were the spaces between ribs. Then a mouth the size of a canyon would open in the slope below him and tear the grass off an entire mountainside in one slow pull, and he would understand, and he would run.

The Beast That Eats the Mountains

This is Behemoth, brought up out of the earth on the day the dry land filled with creatures, and it eats the way nothing else eats. Ordinary animals forage. Behemoth consumes geography. Every day it strips the green growth from a thousand hills, the way a man clears a single field, and it needs every blade of it. There is no foraging in this, no wandering for the next mouthful. The beast was given a dedicated country to feed from, and it empties that country daily.

By any reckoning this should be the end of the hills. A thousand mountains grazed to bare rock, year upon year since creation, should long ago have become a desert of stone. They are not. The miracle is quiet and it happens in the dark. Through the night the cropped slopes green over again, every blade returning as though no jaw had ever closed on it, so that the beast wakes each morning to a thousand hills made new. "Surely the mountains bring him forth food" (Job 40:20). The mountains feed him and the night repairs them, and the cycle has held without a single failure for longer than there have been men to count it.

The River That Circles the World

Such an appetite needs a thirst to match, and no spring or pond would do. The water comes from the Jordan, but not the thin ribbon a person could wade across. The Jordan that Behemoth drinks encircles the whole earth, half of it running in the open light, half of it hidden beneath the ground, a single river wrapped around the world like a belt. The beast lowers its head and the river swells against its mouth, and it is not afraid. "He is confident, though the Jordan swell even to his mouth" (Job 40:23).

Even that is not enough. A second water was opened for it, a river that runs straight out of the garden at the beginning of all gardens, cold and clear from a place no living man walks. That stream exists for one drinker. It was cut into the ground for the sole purpose of carrying water to a throat too large for any natural source to fill. So the beast eats a continent of grass and drinks a river that holds the planet in its arms, and still its strength is held in check, coiled and waiting. "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" (Job 40:16-17).

The Roar in the Month of Tammuz

Once in the turning year the beast lifts its head and makes a sound. It comes in Tammuz, in the heat of high summer, and it comes only once. Across the world, every animal alive stops. The lion holds its paw above the ground. The bird forgets the next wingbeat. The fish hangs in the current. For one held breath the whole moving world goes still, listening to a voice that rolls up out of a thousand hills at once.

The silence is not only terror, though the terror is real. The roar sets an order and renews it. Behemoth was made the master of the dry land, the way another great creature was made master of the sea, and the yearly sound is the reminder that the arrangement still stands, that the hierarchy of the made world is intact for one more year. When the echo dies the lion sets down its paw, the bird beats its wing, the fish slides forward, and the world resumes as though nothing had spoken. But everything that breathes has been reminded who eats the mountains.

Why It Was Never Allowed to Mate

The beast was not made alone. In the beginning there was a male and a female, a pair as vast as each other, and for a moment the world stood at the edge of a different fate. A pair like that could breed. The young of two thousand-hill creatures would have come in numbers no land could hold, each one needing its own thousand hills, each one drinking its own circling river, until there was no earth left under them and the world simply gave out beneath the weight of them.

So the pairing was forbidden before it began. The beast was made unable to bring forth more of its kind, sealed against increase, left to live out its single enormous life with no mate and no offspring and no end through ordinary death. That is why it has lain on the hills since the sixth day, alone, the last and only one, neither growing nor dying, simply waiting.

What the Waiting Is For

The waiting has a purpose, and the purpose is a meal. At the end of days a feast will be set for the righteous, and Behemoth is not a guest at that table. Behemoth is the table. The great beast of the land will be served beside the great beast of the sea, the two masters of the made world brought down at last and laid out for those who kept faith, with Jacob among them and the scholars and the students gathered close. The creature that ate a thousand hills will itself be eaten. The thirst that drank a river will be quenched in another's joy.

So everything about the beast points one direction. The sterility that left it without children, the long unkillable life, the daily miracle that keeps the hills green under it, the once-a-year roar that holds the animals in their places, all of it preserves one creature whole and enormous for one appointed meal. It is being fattened by the centuries. It eats the mountains so that, on the last day, it can be the main course.