by the Egyptians with lance and harpoon, and was therefore no fit symbol of indomitable pride. The crocodile too was attacked and killed by the Egyptians, though in xli. 26-29 leviathan is said to laugh at his assailants. Seneca in his description of Egypt describes the crocodile as 'fugax animal audaci, audacissimum timido' (Quæst. Nat., iv. 2). Comp. Ezek. xxix. 4, xxxii. 3; Herod. ii. 70.
To me, indeed, as well as to M. Chabas, the behemoth and the leviathan seem to claim a kinship with the dragons and other imaginary monsters of the Swiss topographies of the sixteenth century. A still more striking because a nearer parallel is adduced by M. Chabas from the Egyptian monuments, where, side by side with the most accurate pictures from nature, we often find delineations of animals which cannot have existed out of wonderland.[1]
It is remarkable that the elephant should not have been selected as a type of strange and wondrous animal life; apparently it was not yet known to the Hebrew writers, though of course it might be urged that the poet was accidentally prevented from writing more. Merx has pointed out that the description of behemoth is evidently incomplete. He also thinks that the poet has not yet brought the form of these passages to final perfection: a struggle with the difficulties of expression is observable. He therefore relegates xl. 15-xli. 26 to an appendix with the suggestive title (comp. Goethe's Faust) Paralipomena to Job. He thinks that a reader or admirer of the original poem sought to preserve these unfinished sketches by placing them where they now stand. This is probably the most conservative theory (i.e. the nearest to the traditional view) critically admissible.
- ↑ Etudes sur l'antiquité historique, prem. éd., pp. 391-393.
