I’ve shown in several posts like this why Leviathan is a supernatural west-Semitic chaos deity and can’t be a plesiosaur. Recent conversation with my Hebrew professor on some of the Semitic sources has got the subject in the back of my mind again. One issue I still get challenged on is my assertion the Hebrew grammar of Psalm 74 says that Leviathan has multiple heads like the Hydra of Greek myth. (In Ancient Near Eastern drawings and texts Leviathan is characteristically depicted with seven.) Exhibit A is a screen shot of some misinformed comments made on Ken Ham’s Facebook in response to some of my old writings:
Psalm 74:14 reads:
אַתָּ֣ה רִ֭צַּצְתָּ רָאשֵׁ֣י לִוְיָתָ֑ן תִּתְּנֶ֥נּוּ מַ֝אֲכָ֗ל לְעָ֣ם לְצִיִּֽים
“You crushed the heads of Leviathan. You gave him for food to the people of the coast.”
In the construct package ראשי לויתןthe term ראשappears in the plural state in conjunction with the singular noun לויתן. This type of sere-yod plural noun construction to a following singular noun is extremely common in the Bible. If you have taken a semester of Hebrew, you hardly need to be told this.* If not, a very close grammatical phenomenon is visually apparent in a text like Micah 3.9: שִׁמְעוּ-נָא זֹאת, רָאשֵׁי בֵּית יַעֲקֹב. Notice, the plural “heads” is joined by the same construct ending to the singular “house of Jacob.” The laws of the grammar God’s words were inspired in demand that Leviathan has multiple heads in Psalm 74.
Can we stop throwing millions of dollars into museums and speakers based on bad Hebrew grammar?
And stop speculating the physiological logistics of dinosaurs fire-breathing?
And stop singing songs like this:
http://youtu.be/GdCrPkuAoag
Glad I got that out of my system one last time.
* For example, Russell T. Fuller, Invitation to Biblical Hebrew: A Beginning Grammar, (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2006), 61-7.