Are dinosaurs in the Bible?
Yes. God made all creatures on the land and in the sea (Genesis 1:21, 24-25; Psalm 148:7). This means that there were dinosaurs in the Bible. We might even have biblical references to different types of dinosaurs.
What kinds of dinosaurs were in the Bible?
There are different words used in Hebrew for dinosaurs. Some believe that the word Leviathan (Job 41:1-34; Psalms 74:14; 104:26; Isaiah 27:1) was a giant sea creature. We don’t know if it was a serpent, but to be a dinosaur, it would have to be a reptile.
Another possibility for dinosaurs that roamed on land may be called Bohemoth (Job 40:15-34). That’s the Hebrew word for “cattle” in the plural. Some scholars suggest that because it is in the plural it means a much larger creature than cattle. This word would have been the general term for any giant reptiles on the earth.
Hebrew also has a word for dragons, tannin (Psalm 74:13; Isaiah 27:1; 51:9). To my knowledge, these would be exactly what we are thinking of when I say the word dragon, perhaps without the fire-breathing part. I know, I’m disappointed too. They may have also been in the water as well (Job 7:12). Satan is referred to as a dragon (Revelation 12:3, 4, 9, 13, 16, etc.). A dragon is a winged serpent, a reptile. Why would they have the word if they didn’t have dragons?
How could they live alongside of humans?
If dinosaurs are the big scary things from Jurassic Park, how can we imagine that they would live beside humans? Wouldn’t they kill all of the humans? Most scientists believe that dinosaurs were not meat eaters. They wouldn’t have even been hunting human beings.
How long were they on the earth?
That all depends on how old you think the earth is. But we will get to that in another question. One of the time periods we are unfamiliar with being able to gauge the historical length of was what I call prehistory, time between Genesis 1-11.
Human beings lived for hundreds of years during this time. We know from comparing different genealogies in the Bible that not everyone is listed in each genealogy. They could’ve skipped entire generations and this time could’ve been a lot longer than the 4000 years proposed by one of the scholarly mathematicians who added up the genealogies we have.
If it is true that prehistory was much longer than these 4000 years, we must consider the possibility that dinosaurs lived for quite a while on the earth. If Noah included them on the arc, that would mean they lived past the flood into Noah’s time.
They could have died out sometime during the time of prehistory. I would probably lean toward this possibility. But if they did make it into the time after the flood, I suggest some possibilities for what happened to them in the next question below.
What happened to the dinosaurs?
The going theory that is generally accepted by scientists is that a comet hit the earth and made it too hot for the dinosaurs to survive. They place this event at 65 million years ago. Is this possible?
Any kind of major change in temperature, cold or hot, could wipe out any form of life on this planet. There are cosmic constants, measurements that must be specific to foster and sustain life on earth. If these are moved too much in any one way, or even a few of them are out of sync with others, life cannot exist. It is entirely possible that dinosaurs could of been wiped out by a change in temperature or environment.
If we take creation literally, dinosaurs and humans existed together, at least for a time. Everyone thinks I have lost my mind when I suggest this, but it’s possible humans hunted dinosaurs to extinction. Scientific research suggests that most dinosaurs are herbivores. They didn’t even eat meat.
If this is true, they would not even be hunting human beings. If you get enough smart hunters together, human beings can hunt anything to extinction. Just think of all of the animals that are already extinct because of hunting. I am open to the possibility that humans did the same thing to dinosaurs.
What about dinosaur bones and skeletons?
We have found dinosaur bones in the earth. A lot of times they are only in a couple of places. This may mean that the dinosaurs only dwelt in certain places and were not all over the earth. I believe the Bible supports Pangaea, one landmass to begin with that was broken up later (Genesis 1:9-10).
If that is the case, perhaps dinosaurs were separated into certain continents and not others. Perhaps when tectonic plates again to separate the land into multiple continents dinosaurs were stuck in the places they were at the time.
Some Christian scientists pose the suggestion that most of the dinosaurs, if not all, are left on the earth before the flood came. They have reliable scientific evidence that all of the bones we find are from a catastrophic event, the flood. If they all suddenly died at once in groups on these continents in the world, it would have all been buried by the water in the flood. If we found dinosaur bones, there must have been dinosaurs.
