Job 40:19

β . A description of the strange life and habits of this powerful beast, which, though undaunted by the river flood, is easily captured and destroyed by the guile of man, Job 40:19-24.

19. The chief of the ways of God He is a chief, ראשׁית , a firstling, perhaps masterpiece of God’s creative energy. The allusion seems to be to the immense bulk, possibly to his type as being that of the earliest of the extinct pachydermata. Jewish and patristic commentators found on this expression, “firstling of God’s ways,” a symbolic representation of Satan.

Can make his sword to approach Rather, Furnished [ him ] his sword. Thus, essentially, Bochartus, Umbreit, Schlottmann, Renan, Zockler, etc. Dillmann’s rendering, “which was created so as to attach thereon a sword,” gives a sense weak and clumsy, which by no means satisfies his proposed pointing. The utterly irreconcilable renderings of the Septuagint, “made to be mocked at ( εγκαταπαιζεσθαι ) by the angels;” and of Ewald, “Yet his Maker blunts his sword,” serve only to show the contrariety of views that have been taken of this vexed passage. Delitzsch well says, “It is not meant that he reached his sword to behemoth, but (on which account לו is intentionally wanting) that he brought forth, i.e., created, its (behemoth’s) peculiar sword, viz.: the gigantic incisors ranged opposite one another.”… The happy paraphrase of the elegant poet Sandys, early (1638) embodied the true sense:

Of God’s great works the chief, lo! he who made

This behemoth, hath armed him with a blade.

He feeds on lofty hills; lives not by prey,

About this gentle prince the subjects play.

The lower jaw of this animal is provided with enormous ripping, chisel-like canines. (Tristam.) “With these apparently combined teeth the hippopotamus can cut the grass as neatly as if it were mown with the scythe, and is able to sever a tolerably stout and thick stem.” WOOD, Mammalia, p. 762. He also states that in anger it has been known to bite a man completely in two. ( Bib. Animals, page 322.) Ruppel, the German naturalist, captured one of these animals measuring from the snout to the end of the tail fifteen feet; his tusks, from the roots to the point, along the external curve, being twenty-eight inches in length. It is an interesting coincidence that the sword should appear as a characteristic of this animal, in its hieroglyphic name inscribed on Egyptian monuments in an age prior to that of Moses. The third figure from the left is a good representation of the ancient Egyptian scythe or reaping-hook, as depicted on the monuments, and at the same time of the tusk of the hippopotamus. See Excursus VIII, p. 275. Nicander, a Greek poet who lived in the second century B.C., treating of the hippopotamus, speaks of his “destructive sword, or scythe.” κακην … αρπην . Theriaca, 566. Divinely equipped with a sword, he bears the insignia of a warrior; brought to the test, he proves to be a peaceful grazer of the fields; his sword he wields, not that he may destroy life, but that he may reap the tender and succulent growths of the marsh. Labelled a warrior for nature’s battlefield, he appears simply a successful forager. Other interpreters, (T. Lewis and Canon Cook,) accept the authorized version, and understand that the monster is impenetrable by the sword of man. The latter cites a very ancient Egyptian inscription: “The tepi, (i.e., hippopotamus,) the lord of terrors in the water, which man can not approach unto.”