Behemoth appears substantially in one passage, the divine speeches of Job (40:15-24), where it is a huge grazing land animal with bones like bronze and a tail it stiffens "like a cedar," shown to Job as something he did not make and cannot master. The name is the Hebrew behemah, "beast," in an intensive plural form, roughly "the beast of beasts," the animal par excellence.
Ancient and modern readers have tried to identify it with a real creature, usually the hippopotamus or, less plausibly, the elephant, and the description fits a great riverine herbivore well enough; but the point in Job is theological rather than zoological, one of a series of creatures whose wildness lies outside human control and inside God's. In later Jewish tradition Behemoth is paired with Leviathan as the land to the other's sea, the two, with Ziz for the air, forming a triad of primordial monsters reserved for the feast of the righteous at the end of time.