the Berasit Hebrew Dictionary

בהמות

Job 40:15-19 which refers to 'behemot' “the Behemoth”, a powerful monster who established a division of trade routes into the mountains.

However, all indications are that 'behemot' is probably not actually a word in its own right. As a true hapax legomenon, it occurs only once in the entire corpus. The spelling of this word is very similar to a couple of other possible root words:

• It might be a spelling mistake of the word behemeh, meaning “beast”
• It might be an alternate spelling of mot, meaning “death”. Note that 'be/ba' and 'he/ha' are both very common prefixes whose usage here fits with the established patterns of their usage.

The establishing of divisions is an important theme in the ancient Hebrew texts, which we discuss further under berasit. This instance involving either “death” or “a beast” is an interesting case in that the act of division may be interpreted as either an unwitting act of an unthinking beast or a deliberate act of an intelligent entity setting boundaries and facilitating critical economic considerations.

It should be noted that the suffix “ot” might indicate femininity. This is the case where ben (son) becomes benot (daughter). If we take the 'ot' to function as a suffix, we are left with a root word of hem, meaning “they”, so the intended subject here could be referring to a group of women or girls “they (female)”, however, no usage of such a word construction exists within the text, the typical terms being either betol (young women), benot (daughters), or nesim (women).

LexID 930