The Vast and Wonderful Array of Biblical Animals

Would the Creator of the universe omit His most precious works when recounting the wonders of His creation? I don’t think so. That would be like a mother neglecting to mention her kids when you ask about her family!

Maybe the angels are God’s most magnificent creations, but I believe His dearest creations are the animals, of which humans are the apex (according to Genesis 2 and 3).

On that score, the array of animals we find in the Bible is simply astounding. There is no way the written Word of God could provide an exhaustive list of all natural species of animals – even modern science hasn’t been able to do that – but we get a pretty good picture of the range and diversity of animals on God’s green earth when we read the Bible.

Five Problems with Biblical Animals

A list of biblical animal names is below, but before we get to it, there are a couple things to consider:

Translation: First, there is some guess work involved in naming these animals. The Old Testament was written in Ancient Hebrew, so you might imagine that after 3000 years of a written language, many of the terms or their meanings have become obscure, to say the least.

Some have simply been lost to history. For example, early translators thought one of these unknown animals was a giraffe (which never lived in the Mideast) but they didn’t have a name for it, so they invented the name Camelopardalis – “camel-leopard” – to describe it!

Modern scholars have determined that the obscure Hebrew word actually designated a type of desert sheep which did not even remotely resemble a camel, a leopard, or a giraffe. This points out the difficulty of trying to translate Ancient Hebrew. To this day, the Hebrew alphabet doesn’t even have vowels!

The Greek New Testament, in contrast, is easier to translate, not only because it is more recent (it’s only, oh, 2000 years old), but also because Greek was/is an extremely precise language of learning where most of the terms have recognized meanings.

Geography: Modern scientific taxonomy (naming systems) can break biological categories down so precisely that we can name and know the multiple variants of species and subspecies of animal families throughout the entire world.

The biblical writers didn’t have that advantage. The types of animals they knew were essentially limited to the geographical region of the Middle East. Hence, the Bible has six names for lizard and nine words for locust! They used specific names when they knew them, of course, but often times they had to be satisfied with general categories and poetic descriptions.

This is especially true of the biblical writers’ knowledge of animals in other lands, which was usually folkloric and quite vague (hence the Bible’s inability to clearly identify familiar Asian-African creatures like the elephant, rhino, hippo, and tiger.) There are no pandas, anteaters, kangaroos, platypuses, llamas, or raccoons in the Bible. The human writers of scripture simply had no knowledge of them.

Time Warp: Consider also the confusion of cultures and languages over time. Transferring a word from Hebrew to Greek to Latin to Middle English (the first English translation) to Shakespearean English (King James Version) to Modern English is potentially like the telephone game that leaves a long trail of misunderstandings down a rather unreliable human chain.

Translators today have the advantage of skipping over historical misfires and going directly to the sources, but that is a modern phenomenon. In short, it’s amazing we know any of these animals’ names with any precision.

Extinction: There is also the question of missing animals. For example, an extinct species of livestock, called the Aurochs, was known to previous generations but not to us. In various translations of the Bible, it was generally referred to as a Bison, Ox, or Wild Ox, but the Douay-Rheims Bible (1609) translated it into English as a Rhinoceros (in Numbers 23:22; 24:8; Job 39:9, 10) and even as a Unicorn (in Psalms 22:21; 29:6; 92:10; Isaiah 34:7)!

Noah’s Ark: Although Noah saved all the animals on the planet, you’ll notice that the famed incident of Noah’s Ark (Genesis 7) is completely absent from the list below. Despite the many artistic depictions of the various species walking into the ark two by two, there is no actual list of animals that got on the ark!

In fairness to old Noah, he was being obedient to God and divided the animals up into the categories of clean and unclean, without being specific about the passengers. What with the end of the world coming and a major boat building project going on, who would’ve had time to list them all?

But wouldn’t you like to have been one of the two flies on the wall when that epic event took place?

Mythical Creatures

And we must also not overlook the mythical creatures that appear in the Bible, particularly Dragon, Behemoth, Leviathan, and Satyr. In many older translations of the Bible, these names were commonly substituted for an unknown Hebrew word for a monstrous creature the translators could not identify.

Most folk literature is full of mythical creatures, which Sigmund Freud would probably have said were nothing more than projections of their subconscious tribal fears. But biblical writers tended to name their fears and mix them up with demonic beings who were part of their religious worldview. So, ferocious animals and wicked demons are not always distinct in the Old Testament.

Full List of Animals in the Bible

In any case, if you’re an animal lover like I am, I think you’ll enjoy the list. When you read it, you’ll notice frequent references to Deuteronomy 14 and Leviticus 11. These are the chapters where Moses enumerates the list of clean and unclean animals that make up the Jewish kosher laws. Both chapters contain more than thirty separate animal names.

Also, take note of the astonishing number of references to animals in the writings of the Prophet Isaiah. And please don’t think this is a full list of all the references to these animals in the Bible. I just didn’t want to overwhelm you with numbers.

Even this long list could be multiplied by innumerable subspecies and alternative translations of the names of these animals, but that’s not the point of the exercise. The point is to glorify God for creating such a magnificent animal kingdom and for seeing fit to dignify the animals by making His own Son part of that kingdom.

Not only did the Lord Jesus Christ become the most perfect member of the perfect animal species (homo sapiens), but we also call Him “the lion of the tribe of Judah” (Revelation 5:5) and “the Lamb that was slain” (Revelation 5:6) as a sacrifice for our sins.

The angels must be jealous.

Soul Work

Animal life is literally all around us, but we sometimes miss it completely. This may be due to our strange modern detachment from the world of Nature, or it may be due to our busy lifestyles.

Whatever the cause, take time today to open the eyes of your mind and heart to the abundant gift of animal life in your environment. You may not live around Hyraxes, Hoopoes, Leviathans or Behemoths (!) but you’ll probably spot a chipmunk, a lizard, or a squirrel scurrying away if you are on the lookout for local fauna.

If you are lucky enough to own a pet, thank God for that little blessing God has given you to connect you back to the natural world in a very tangible way.

Sharpening our perceptions of the world around us sensitizes us to its hidden wonders. This kind of interior exercise helps us to see the divine light filtering through the many shimmering sacred windows of our mysteriously beautiful world, including God’s precious animals.