Leviathan

• 1. Introduction

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  Leviathan is a giant sea serpent of theology and mythology, and one rabbi claimed to have seen proof of its size from the deck of a ship.

  The account comes from Johanan bar Nappaha. He told of sailing past a fish that lifted its head from the water. Horns on the creature carried a message: "I am one of the meanest creatures that inhabit the sea. I am three hundred miles in length, and enter this day into the jaws of the Leviathan."

  If a fish of that scale is only a minor creature, what kind of monster swallows it? The question has followed Leviathan for thousands of years. Some traditions treat the beast as an enemy to be destroyed. Others treat it as a banquet, a symbol of enlightenment, or a picture of the state.

  This documentary traces the creature to its oldest known ancestors. It then follows Leviathan through scripture, rabbinic legend, Christian demonology and Gnostic cosmology. Finally it asks how one fearsome name ended up meaning a whale.

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• 2. Names and Older Monsters

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  Gesenius, among other scholars, traced the Hebrew name לִוְיָתָן to a root meaning to twine or to join. On that reading, Leviathan is the creature wreathed and twisted in folds.

  The theory has weak points. The suffix it requires is almost unattested elsewhere, with Nehushtan as a possible exception, and that word's own origin is unknown. The letter tav in the name would also need an explanation. Leskien and other philologists thought the word was a foreign loanword. A third school treats it as a proper noun, and Bauer proposed a compound meaning "wreath of serpent."

  The mythological figure is easier to trace than the word. Both the name and the monster continue the Ugaritic sea creature Lôtān. In the Baal Cycle, Lôtān serves the sea god Yammu and is defeated by Hadad.

  The Ugaritic text has gaps, so scholars cannot always tell which lines describe Lôtān and which describe other monsters under Yammu's command. One of those others is Tunannu, the biblical Tannin. Most scholars call Lôtān "the fugitive serpent." He may also be "the wriggling serpent" and "the mighty one with seven heads," but the text does not settle it.

  Lôtān had a predecessor. Syrian seals from the 18th-16th century BC show Hadad killing an earlier serpent named Têmtum.

  Sea serpents run through the mythology of the ancient Near East. By the 3rd millennium BC, Sumerian images already showed the god Ninurta overcoming a seven-headed serpent. Religions of the region often told of a Chaoskampf, a cosmic battle in which a creator god or hero uses force to impose order on a sea monster of chaos.

  The Babylonian version is the best known. Marduk defeats the serpent goddess Tiamat and builds the heavens and the earth from her body. Comparative mythologists also set the Canaanite monster beside Indra slaying Vritra and Thor slaying Jörmungandr. More recent scholarship places these sea serpents within the wider serpent symbolism of the ancient Mediterranean.

  The Leviathan of the Book of Job is a reflection of Lotan, the primeval monster Baal Hadad overcame. Hebrew writers inherited this figure and placed it in some of their most memorable poetry.

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• 3. Leviathan in Scripture

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  The name Leviathan appears just six times in the Tanakh, and the longest portrait fills Job 41:1-34. God describes the creature as a showpiece of his own power. The chapter opens with a verse that sets the tone: "Behold, the hope of him is in vain; shall not one be cast down even at the sight of him?"

  The description goes on to give Leviathan fire-breathing ability and impenetrable scales. Nothing in the chapter suggests any human could master it.

  Psalm 104 treats the creature differently. There God is praised for making all things, and Leviathan is simply one of them. Isaiah 27:1 returns to menace, calling Leviathan the "tortuous serpent" that God will kill at the end of time.

  The related Tannin appear in the Genesis creation narrative, where the King James Version renders them "great whales." They also appear in Job and the Psalms. In those passages they are not harmful. They are ocean creatures within God's creation.

  Other passages use Leviathan for Israel's powerful enemies, with Babylon the leading example. Scholars see two possible explanations for the contrast. The idea of a contest between God and a sea monster may echo Mesopotamian and Canaanite legends. It may also echo the Egyptian struggle between the snake Apep and the sun god Ra.

  Alternatively, the gentler passages may reflect an effort to naturalize the figure. In that process, a deity was demoted to a demon and then to a mere monster.

  Later Jewish writers took Isaiah's prophecy of a killing and turned it into something unexpected: a dinner.

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• 4. A Feast for the Righteous

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  The Book of Enoch, at 60:7-9, gives Leviathan a gender. It describes a female monster living in the watery abyss, as Tiamat did. Her counterpart Behemoth is male and lives in a desert called Dunaydin, east of Eden.

  Later Jewish sources picture Leviathan as a dragon living over the sources of the deep. Together with the land monster Behemoth, it is destined to be served to the righteous at the end of time. Enoch 60:24 likewise describes both beasts being prepared for an eschatological meal.

  The midrash explains why the meal is possible. God first created a male and a female leviathan. Fearing that they would multiply and destroy the world, he killed the female and reserved her flesh for the banquet that will mark the coming of the Messiah.

  Rashi repeats the tradition in his commentary on Genesis 1:21. He cites the Aggadah in saying that God made the pair male and female and salted the female away for the righteous. Left to breed, they would have made the world impossible.

  Talmud Baba Bathra 75 adds details of the feast. Leviathan's skin will cover the tent where the righteous gather. People who do not deserve a seat at the table are not shut out entirely. Depending on merit, they receive vestments of Leviathan, from coverings for the somewhat deserving to amulets for the least deserving. Whatever skin remains will be stretched over the walls of Jerusalem, and its brightness will light the world.

  The festival of Sukkot carries this hope into the present. It ends with a prayer spoken on leaving the booth: "May it be your will, Lord our God and God of our forefathers, that just as I have fulfilled and dwelt in this sukkah, so may I merit in the coming year to dwell in the sukkah of the skin of Leviathan. Next year in Jerusalem."

  An eleventh-century religious poem, Akdamut, is recited on Shavuot. It imagines God slaughtering Leviathan and serving it as a sumptuous banquet for all the righteous in heaven. The poem gives the beast "mighty fins," which makes it a kosher fish rather than an inedible snake or crocodile.

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• 5. Rabbinic Imagination

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  Rabbi Dimi, speaking in the name of Rabbi Johanan, reported what happens when Leviathan is hungry. The creature sends out so much heat from its mouth that the waters of the deep boil. Its home is the Mediterranean Sea, and if it pushed its head into Paradise, no living creature could bear the smell.

  A legend in the midrash called Pirke de-Rabbi Eliezer gives Leviathan a daily appetite. It eats one whale every day. The fish that swallowed Jonah is said to have escaped being eaten by the narrowest of margins.

  The creature's body also gives off light, especially its eyes. Rabbi Eliezer once sailed with Rabbi Joshua, who was frightened when a brilliant light suddenly appeared. Eliezer explained that it probably came from the eyes of Leviathan. He pointed to Job 41:18: "By his neesings a light doth shine, and his eyes are like the eyelids of the morning."

  Despite supernatural strength, the monster has one fear. A small worm called the kilbit clings to the gills of large fish and kills them, and Leviathan dreads it.

  The Zohar reads the whole banquet tradition differently. It says the story of the righteous eating Leviathan at the end of days is not literal. It is a metaphor for enlightenment. The Zohar also gives the creature a mate, and it links the image with the tzaddik, the righteous person, and with the Sefira of Yesod. In Zohar 2:20a it connects the leviathan with the pole running through the boards of the tabernacle.

  Abraham Isaac Kook pushed the symbolism further. Citing the Zohar and Rashi on Baba Batra 74b, he pictured a single creature with no mate, its tail in its mouth, twisting around the entire world. For Kook, that image expresses the hidden unity of the universe, which will be revealed only when the righteous feast on Leviathan.

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• 6. Dragon and Demon

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  The Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, usually renders Leviathan as drakon, a dragon. That word appears again in the Book of Revelation, and it changes the creature's meaning. Nowhere does the Old Testament identify Leviathan with the devil. Revelation's seven-headed dragon is explicitly the devil.

  The ancient struggle between God and the chaos monsters therefore becomes a struggle between God and Satan. In the Book of Job alone, the Greek text uses a different word, ketos, meaning sea monster.

  In the following chapter of Revelation, a seven-headed beast with the dragon's features rises from the waters. It gives power to a Beast of the Earth. The split between a water monster and a land monster probably recalls the pair Leviathan and Behemoth. As Isaiah 27:1 foretells, the dragon is slain on the last day and cast into the abyss. Its destruction brings a new world of peace.

  Jerome, commenting on Psalm 104:26, called Leviathan "the dragon that was cast out of Paradise, that beguiled Eve, and is permitted in this world to make sport of us." He lamented how many monks and clerics it had dashed headlong.

  Peter Binsfeld later gave the creature a rank. He classified Leviathan as the demon of envy, one of the seven Princes of Hell matched to the seven deadly sins.

  Leviathan also became linked with the Hellmouth, a monstrous animal into whose mouth the damned vanish at the Last Judgment. The motif appears in Anglo-Saxon art from about 800 and later spread across Europe.

  In 1969, Anton LaVey's The Satanic Bible gave Leviathan a new role. He assigned it the element of water and the direction west, and he listed it among the Four Crown Princes of Hell. The scheme drew on the demonic hierarchy in The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin the Mage.

  The Church of Satan marks the points of the Baphomet sigil with Hebrew letters. Read counter-clockwise from the lowest point of the pentagram, they spell לויתן, Leviathan.

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• 7. The Serpent Around the World

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  Origen, a Church Father, accused a Gnostic sect of venerating the serpent of the Garden of Eden. He named them Ophites, after the serpent they supposedly worshipped. Whether they actually equated that serpent with Leviathan is unknown.

  In their cosmology, Leviathan appears as an ouroboros. It is a dragon-shaped archon that bites its own tail and wraps around the material world. That ring separates the lower world, governed by the Archons, from the realm of God. Ophite diagrams show Leviathan enclosing the space of matter like a sphere.

  The creature is the source of evil throughout the universe. It also traps souls that are too attached to material things, and those souls cannot reach the fullness of God beyond.

  The journey after death is a test. A soul must pass through seven heavenly spheres. If it fails, Leviathan swallows it and sends it back into the body of an animal.

  Because Leviathan has such negative associations in this system, scholars infer that if the Ophites linked it with the Genesis serpent, they probably thought it evil. Its advice in the garden would then be the only good thing about it.

  Mandaeism ties Leviathan to a demon named Ur and treats the two as coessential. Manichaeism, an ancient religion shaped by Gnostic ideas, tells a different story. There the sons of the fallen angel Shemyaza kill Leviathan.

  The act is not heroic. It is foolish. Archangels kill the killers in turn after they boast of their victory, so the greatest triumphs prove transient. The tale reflects Manichaean criticism of royal power and a preference for asceticism.

  A very different thinker would later borrow the monster for a book about kings and commonwealths.

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• 8. A Word for Power

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  Thomas Hobbes published Leviathan in 1651. His monster is the state. In his book, the state holds omnipotent power and sustains itself by educating children in its favor, generation after generation.

  The resulting power feeds on citizens it keeps producing. It rests on a theory of conditioning that stamps the human conscience in a mechanical way. Hobbes frames the world as a contest of good and evil. His speculative natural law has people treating each other like ravenous wolves. The laws of the state, passed on through teaching, are justified by their ability to contain that frightening condition.

  Hobbes's book also draws on Behemoth, the other biblical term. From the early 17th century, "leviathan" came to describe overwhelmingly powerful people or things.

  The word also drifted toward the ocean's real giants. Herman Melville's Moby-Dick uses it for great whales. The first Hebrew translator of the novel, Elyahu Burtinker, rendered "whale" as tanin and kept "leviathan" as it was. He meant tanin as another sea monster. In modern Hebrew, though, tanin more often means crocodile, while לויתן itself now simply means whale.

  The crocodile reading has older roots. Some 19th-century scholars pragmatically read Leviathan as a large aquatic animal such as the crocodile. The Revised Standard Version suggests in a footnote to Job 41:1 that Leviathan may be a name for the crocodile. Another footnote, to Job 40:15, suggests that Behemoth may be the hippopotamus.

  Science has since adopted the name too. Livyatan is an extinct genus of sperm whales. On Triton, the largest moon of Neptune, a major cryovolcanic feature carries the name Leviathan Patera.

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