With the huge success of the movie “Jurassic Park,” details about dinosaurs are oozing out of everywhere, from scholarly journals to newspapers to McDonald’s soft-drink cups.
Yet the all-time best-selling chronicle of ancient history, the Bible, makes no mention of dinosaurs. They aren’t even in Old Testament descriptions of the earliest days of creation.
So how do experts reconcile Tyrannosaurus rex and his ilk with the story of the Earth chronicled in the Bible?
Some biblical fundamentalists have insisted that dinosaurs never existed and that bones cited as evidence to the contrary were just planted by God to test humans’ faith.
But far more often, especially recently, scholars have sought to explain that parts of the Bible, such as accounts of creation and the great flood, leave room for dinosaurs. The first two chapters of the Book of Genesis relate different versions of the story in which God creates animal life. Later, in the story of the flood, Genesis says that God told Noah to gather two of every animal and take them on his ark to save them. In none of these stories does the Bible specify the animals.
John Collins, an Old Testament professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School, noted that there are references to giant, scary and possibly mythical beasts in the Bible, and to God “shutting them behind doors in the process of creation.”
In the Book of Job, God tells of confining the seas behind barred doors and describes “behemoth” (“which feeds on grass like an ox. What strength he has in his loins, what power in the muscles of his belly! His tail sways like a cedar”). And the poetic Psalm 74 celebrates God’s victory over “the monster in the waters” in verse reminiscent of older Mesopotamian myths, declaring, “It was you who crushed the heads of Leviathan.”
Those passages are from the New International Version of the Bible. Animals described in that version as hyenas and jackals are described in the King James version as wild beasts and dragons, as in Isaiah 13:22, “And the wild beasts of the islands shall cry in their desolate houses, and dragons in their pleasant palaces.”
Rev. Bruce Metzger, a Scriptures expert and professor emeritus at Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey, said that to “a person with imagination,” such passages from Job, Psalms and Isaiah “might suggest something similar to dinosaurs.”
Likewise, he said, accounts of creation in Genesis “leave room for the possibility of dinosaurs.”
“Of course,” he quipped, “they also leave open the possibility that there were television sets.”
David Noel Freedman, a professor of Hebrew and biblical studies at the University of California at San Diego, said, “There is no clear evidence in the Bible for recognition of dinosaurs.”
Room for dinosaurs
But he acknowledged that an argument is made that between the two distinct accounts of creation in the first and second chapters of Genesis, “there was an infinite time span that allows for chaos and monsters before God created order and Adam and Eve.”
The first chapter of Genesis is often interpreted as literally describing a six-day creation. But some scholars argue that it leaves room for evolution-and dinosaurs.
“Where do dinosaurs fit into Genesis? That depends on how literally you take Genesis,” said Jeff Meldrum, assistant professor of evolutionary biology at Northwestern University Medical School.
“Was the Earth created in six solar days, or was each day thousands or millions of years? If it is the latter, dinosaurs could be encompassed in one of those periods.”
Old Testament scholar Raymond Ortlund, an assistant professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, explained the absence of dinosaurs in scripture by saying, “The Bible is an accurate, but not complete, historical account.
“I have no doubt that dinosaurs existed, but that’s not the kind of question in which the Old Testament was interested,” he said. “The Bible leaves room for innumerable things in history that don’t fall into the purview of what the biblical authors intended to convey.”
Jurassic is the name given to a period in the Earth’s history, estimated at 140 million to 190 million years ago, in which scientists say dinosaurs reached their peak in number and size. During the following Cretaceous Period, the dinosaurs died out.
Rev. Donald Cole, who has been the radio pastor for Chicago’s conservative evangelical Moody Bible Institute for 22 years, said, “I don’t know any Christians who doubt the existence of dinosaurs. However, most conservative biblical students believe that dinosaurs didn’t die out millions of years ago, but rather that they existed no more than 10,000 years ago.”
That’s an acceptable figure to scriptural scholars who’ve tried to trace history back to creation via Old Testament genealogies, though it winds up many millions of years short of where scientists put dinosaurs, let alone the age of the Earth. Those differences have often made for good drama, such as the courtroom debate between Spencer Tracy and Fredric March in “Inherit the Wind,” the 1960 movie about the Scopes Monkey Trial.
Rejecting science
When it comes to dating dinosaur bones back millions of years and suggesting that humans evolved from lower life forms, “many conservative and evangelical Christians just have to reject science,” Cole said.
“We believe in a literal flood, at the time of Noah’s Ark, with dinosaurs dying out at about the time of the flood, or shortly thereafter,” he said. Noting that the Bible describes the ark as immense, he added, “I believe dinosaurs probably were taken on the ark, possibly in the form of babies or eggs.”
But he wouldn’t insist on that view. “Where scripture is vague,” he said, “only an idiot is dogmatic.”
As an evangelical Christian who acknowledges both creation and evolution, Ortlund said, “There are two textbooks that take us into deep antiquity: fossil records and the Old Testament. You cannot match them to each other.
“The Old Testament leaves room for the dinosaurs to have existed, but I don’t see anywhere that they appear,” he said, adding, “Even though the time of the flood and Noah’s ark are undated in the Bible, and we don’t know exactly what animals were taken, I certainly wouldn’t say there were dinosaurs on the ark.”
Metzger offered another reason why the Bible’s authors might not have written about dinosaurs. When Genesis was written 2,500 years ago, he said, “people wouldn’t have had any notion of the existence of dinosaurs. There was no historical information on dinosaurs until scientists brought it to us.”
Whether the Bible’s authors knew anything about dinosaurs is “a matter of speculation,” Ortlund said. But if the Bible were written today, he added, “there would be major world events and figures . . . even dinosaurs perhaps . . . overlooked by its authors as not significant in their context.”
Rev. Philip Hefner, director of the Chicago Center for Religion and Science on the campus of the Lutheran School of Theology, said he found one aspect of “Jurassic Park” particulatly fascinating from a religious perspective. The dinosaurs begin attacking human beings, he said, “because, by cloning and recreating dinosaurs, the human beings, the scientists, started messing with God’s plan.”
But that’s another story.
