The DragonĪnother beast from Revelation, the great Dragon is described as having seven heads and ten horns (those are very popular in Revelation.) He also has a tail capable of sweeping a third of the stars out of the sky. These beasts are often said to represent four different nations that existed in Daniel’s day. And believe it or not, the vision actually gets weirder from there. In one of these visions, Daniel sees no less than four monsters emerge from the sea: one is a lion with eagle’s wings, which is then transformed into a human-like creature and has its wings plucked off one is a bear-like creature who is told to gorge himself on flesh one looks like a leopard with four wings and four heads, and one has iron teeth and ten horns, with which it destroys the whole earth. Like Revelation, the book of Daniel is largely made up of visions which are meant to symbolize real-world events. The horsemen army is led by four fallen angels, which is never good. Eventually, they’re responsible for the deaths of a third of all mankind. Their horses have the heads of lions, tails like serpents, and spit smoke, fire and brimstone out of their mouths. But these riders aren’t to be messed with, either. This epic army also appears in the visions of Revelation, although they’re not to be confused with the far more famous Four Horsemen, the guys who symbolize Death, War, Famine and Pestilence. Their scorpion’s tails are used to sting their victims, an experience that’s apparently so painful that ‘men shall seek death, and shall not find it.’ Ouch. These guys are ruled by Abaddon, an angel of the bottomless pit whose name means ‘Destroyer.’ Because they appear in Revelation, they’re of course not satisfied with being normal locusts: instead, they resemble war horses, have the stinging tails of scorpions, the faces of men, long hair like a woman’s, and wear crowns of gold and armored breastplates. The cockatrice, a rooster-headed dragon mentioned in the book of Isaiah, has been scaled down in more recent translations to ‘viper.’ Lilith, a female demon, has been downgraded to ‘screech owl’, and mentions of satyrs (half-man, half-goat creatures) have been changed to ‘goats.’ More linguistically accurate, maybe, but nowhere near as fun. In fact, a whole bunch of ‘mythical creatures’ in the King James Bible are simply additions by medieval translators who were more interested in being poetic than in making sure their creatures existed. Which is a shame, because unicorns are far more interesting than slightly-larger-than-usual cows. Unicorns are mentioned nine times in the King James Bible, a medieval translation that remains popular to this day: ‘Will the unicorn be willing to serve thee, or abide by thy crib? Canst thou bind the unicorn with band in the furrow?’ the book asks. Unfortunately, linguists have since discovered that the Hebrew word re’em, translated as ‘unicorn’ here, actually refers to the aurochs, a distant ancestor of the modern cow which went extinct in the 17 th century. Once again, interpretations are varied: it’s been described as a symbol for everything from the prophet Mohammed to the modern United States. It also allows the first beast to kill anyone who doesn’t worship it. This guy’s job is to perform false miracles that encourage people to worship the first beast. It has two horns and speaks ‘like a dragon.’ Personally, I’ve never heard a dragon speak, but I imagine it must be scary. This beast, which unsurprisingly follows the first, rises up out of the earth. Theologians and Biblical scholars have interpreted this beast as symbolizing everything from the Papacy to the 1 st Century Roman Emperor Nero. It also features the feet of a bear, the mouth of a lion, and the general appearance of a leopard. The ‘First Beast’ of Revelation, so called because it’s mentioned first and no one came up with a better name, is a monster with seven heads and ten horns that rises from the ocean. No one agrees on whether this book of ‘visions’ contains descriptions of future events, or symbolic representations of the past, but everyone agrees that it sure has a lot of monsters. If there’s one place that’s good for finding Biblical monsters, it’s the book of Revelation. Less imaginative scholars have suggested that the Behemoth is simply a poetic description of a real giant creature, like a hippopotamus. In Jewish tradition, the Behemoth is a primal earth-monster, a symbol of chaos. However, carbon dating aside, the creature is mentioned as having a navel, which would rule it out as an egg-hatched lizard. His tail is so large that it ‘moves like a cedar.’ This description has led some Creationists to claim that Behemoth was in fact a Biblical-era dinosaur. In Job, one of the Bible’s oldest books, the Behemoth is described as a gigantic, powerful creature that can only be tamed by God.