As I’ve already stated—and even though your question is facetious in a tongue-in-cheek way—I think I may recognize what you are really asking.
Whether or not an elephant is foreign to an omniscient creator’s experience is irrelevant. (Now I’m being flippant in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way.) Consider this question: Does God communicate with humans through “his language” or in human language and ways of observing the world?
A lot of the linguistic concepts bearing upon this topic (many of which I’ve already raised) are foreign to those who haven’t had a lot of linguistics coursework or even multi-lingual experience. Indeed, even though many of these ideas are familiar in actual practice to monolingual speakers of English, they are so taken for granted and so unconsciously applied when speaking and writing that few pause to consider them.
Let’s look at some examples which may help introduce these concepts. I once talked with a student in a Sunday School class (where I was the guest speaker and addressing some “Science and the Bible” issues) who insisted, “Yes, the mustard seed was actually the smallest of all seeds—or at least it was at the time of Jesus.” When someone in the class pointed that that “Orchid seeds are much smaller than mustard seeds”, this student made virtually the same argument that you (@J.E.S.) are making: “Do you really think that orchid seeds were foreign to God’s experience—considering that Jesus was God incarnate and wouldn’t have displayed such ignorance of basic botany?” [Let’s put aside the kenosis topic inherent to his question and talk instead about whether it was human experience or God’s experience that was the basis of communicating theological truths here in the Jesus passage.] So the student reasoned that because Jesus as God would have known about orchid seeds, he would supposedly have never made an inaccurate statement about mustard seeds being smallest . He further reasoned that even though orchid seeds are smaller than mustard seeds today, that must not have been the case in Jesus day. He refused to consider that Jesus statement was contextualized to the understanding of people in first century Palestine, rather than an absolutely precise, modern-day scientific understanding of botanical knowledge. He maintained that “God always speaks accurately.” [That prompted me to repeat a favorite Kenneth Kantzer emphasis: “The Bible is always truthful but not always accurate. And that in no way compromises inerrancy.”]
J.E.S., you are falling into the same manner of thinking when you assume that a pericope in Job 40 where God speaks to Job about the Behemoth wouldn’t use terminology, similes, distinctions, and descriptions that were from Job’s point of view (and that of the culture and language familiar to him.)
[By the way, I should also point out an issue which potentially complicates lots of Old Testament passages, especially when they are outside the usual “Hebrew cultural mainstream” of the Masoretic Text. That is, the early chapters of Genesis and the Book of Job are of unknown geographic location, culture, and language. To be specific, we don’t really know where Job lived, what language he spoke, etc. nor do we even know if the Job story had gone through a series of languages as oral tradition and/or writings over multiple centuries before it was recorded in Hebrew. This further complicates our hermeneutics. It is also worth noting that with ancient languages it is often hard to know what should be understood “literally, word for word” versus what entails a phrase which would have been understood by native speakers as an idiom. Accordingly, we may never know that some of our translations of various hapax phrases (i.e., occurring only once in all of the Bible or even all extent ancient literature) were completely mistaken because we had no means of recognizing the idiomatic nature of the phrase. Imagine a translator thousands of years in the future coming upon an “ancient” English text that speaks of “raining cats and dogs.” We laugh and know exactly what it means. Without helpful context and only a hapax to study, a future translator of modern American English may have no clue what it means besides a mechanical translation of the four words “raining cats and dogs.” Of course, a rigidly literal translation of “raining cats and dogs” would be hilariously wrong-minded.]
I’m not at all sure that I fully grasp your argument at this point but I will take a stab at it. Again I will use an example:
I recently read a blog article by a lady describing the scenes of nature she witnessed from her backyard window. She included a description something like this: “Suddenly I saw this cute little iridescent helicopter flit among the coral bells growing in my window box. It maneuvered effortlessly, it’s propellers invisible to the eye but aerodynamically effective nonetheless.”
I recognized immediately that she was describing a hummingbird. Of course, she chose to call it a “helicopter”. She spoke of it’s wings as if they were “propellers”. Now, does that mean that if I look up the word “helicopter” in an English dictionary, one of the secondary meanings will be “a synonym for a hummingbird”? No. Moreover, if I looked up “propeller” in an English dictionary, would “a bird’s wings, especially those of a hummingbird” be listed among the definitions? No. Welcome to Linguistics 101.
Of course, the issue with the language in which God spoke to Job (i.e., Job’s native language) may have been far more clear than what has come down to us in Hebrew translation. [There is no reason to assume that Job spoke Hebrew.] And consider again that the common English word for an elephant’s proboscis is based on what started out as a convenient analog. That is, we call it a trunk because it is, “trunk-like”, which in 1600’s English was “hose-like” and “main-body-like”, like the trunk of a tree or even the trunk of a man. [[I don’t want to get far off into a tangent but ultimately it goes back to Latin and Old French, where _trunk_ meant the “main stem or stock” of the human body or a tree. By the way, if you have a big heavy trunk, aka a storage chest, in your attic, it got that name because in the old days it would have been made from the trunk of a tree.]] In Job’s culture and language, they may just as easily have compared an elephant’s trunk to a tail----because it swings like a tail and it hangs from the middle of one of the ends of the animal. That may sound very foreign to us, but only because our culture and language happened to get in the habit of comparing an elephant’s proboscis to something else.
I first became aware of the crucial importance of these kinds of translation issues when I was speaking at a conference where the other guest sharing that session was an SIL/Wycliffe Bible translation regional director and he was giving many examples of real-life translation problems where they had to correct their initial translations because they failed to grasp the perspective of the target language-speaking population’s culture. In most cases they had erred towards the rigidly word-for-word literal idea and entirely missed the meaning in the process.
Of course, if we had a large body of literature from Job’s culture, it is entirely possible that we could look up their word for an elephant’s proboscis and it would obviously be the same word that they used for an elephant’s tail. (Perhaps they distinguished them by speaking of “the big tail” and “the little tail” of an elephant—just as we have to use extra distinctions to avoid confusion between a man’s trunk, an elephant’s trunk, the trunk of a tree, and a trunk in the attic.) Without that corpus of ancient literature, we simply have to deal with the ambiguities of the text, just as they are, while also recognizing the range of possibilities based on what we know from comparative and historical linguistics.
All that said, let’s get back to the original question: Is the behemoth a sauropod or an elephant? Can we at least agree that it was rare for a Bible commentator (or even a scientist) to link the behemoth with a sauropod until the relatively recent ascent of the Young Earth Creationism and “scientific creationism” movement? And is there any doubt that the primary motivation was seeking reasons to argue that—despite the copious scientific evidence to the contrary—that dinosaurs lived contemporaneously with humans? Can we at least admit that much?
Just recently I had someone ask me this “Is the behemoth in Job 40 a dinosaur?” question in a Wednesday night Bible study class. The entire audience acknowledged that they had heard this association at some point. (Many rejected it, many accepted it, and an equal number said they just didn’t know.) So I asked them to sit down at their tables with whatever Bible translation they had with them, and to simply read Job 40 and make a list of the “clues” as to what the animal was. Then we discussed their lists and I wrote the main characteristics on a marker board.
It was interesting how many of the class members thought the text (regardless of their particular translation) said that the behemoth was “as big as a cedar tree.” Many were quite surprised that they missed the fact that it actually said something more like “a tail that moves like a cedar tree.” The animal is described as strong and having no reason to fear other animals. It wades confidently into a “raging river”, something many animals do today quite routinely.
Once we finished collating their lists into one summary on the marker board–and had clarified the cedar tree comparison—I asked them how many of their descriptions fit a sauropod? Of course, with many of the students, they just weren’t sure. (After all, none were sauropod experts.) Even so, various of the descriptions matched lots of animals, sauropods included.
Then I asked them how many of the descriptions demanded a sauropod and no other animal. There were a lot of smiles and chuckles and nodding of heads. The discussion then headed into the territory of “If I hadn’t heard the dinosaur connection for years, I don’t think I would have given any thought to the behemoth being a sauropod.”
When the discussion wrapped up, one fellow (a big Ken Ham supporter) said, “Yes, but it could have been a sauropod. It’s not impossible. And keep in mind that dinosaurs were like reptiles today, they keep growing throughout their lifetimes. So in a tropical environment with abundant food and with even humans living to be hundreds of years old, it makes sense that dinosaurs would have grown to be huge.” Of course, that sets off tons of error-alarms and incongruities, but I thought it was interesting how important it was for him that one of the few popular “young earth arguments from the Bible” (in his mind) was appearing to be in serious jeopardy and that he was nevertheless content with a “It’s not impossible that it could have been a sauropod!” argument. It was a reminder just how little the “dinosaurs were contemporaneous with humans” advocates have to work with in trying to convince the general public.
As others have already posted, it should concern us far more that when we focus on a zoologically-ambiguous passage like Job 40 as if it is a serious argument for dinosaurs living contemporaneously with humans, we are doing so while ignoring MOUNTAINS of contrary data. And that’s “kinda” sad, as someone already noted.
The Sensuous Curmudgeon blogger often likes to cite what he calls the cardinal rule of Young Earth Creationism a la Ken Ham & Company:
(1) Major on some obscure and generally ambiguous “evidence” cherry-picked to bolster one’s religion-based belief;
(2) Totally ignore the massive contrary scientific evidence compiled over centuries by both religious and non-religious people who applied the scientific method.
(3) Declare the matter settled and victory attained.
[Personally, I would add a fourth step to the above: “Rinse and repeat.” ]
Obviously, not all Young Earth Creationists do that by any means. But in the past half century we have seen a lot of origins-industry entrepreneurs turn that three-step and four-step formula into lucrative empires.