Behemoth by Jorge Luis Borges

Four centuries before the Christian era, Behemoth was a magnification of the elephant or of the hippopotamus, or a mistaken and alarmist version of these animals; it is now precisely the ten famous verses describing it in Job (XL: 15-24) and the huge being which these lines evoke. The rest is wrangling and philology.

The word ‘Behemoth' is plural; scholars tell us it is the intensive plural form of the Hebrew b'hemah, which means ‘beast'. As Fray Luis de León wrote in his Exposición del Libro de Job: ‘Behemoth is a Hebrew word that stands for "beasts"; according to the received judgement of learned men, it means the elephant, so called because of its inordinate size; and being but a single animal it counts for many.'