Leviathan

Leviathan is a sea-monster of the Hebrew Bible whose language is older than the Bible itself. Ugaritic texts from Ras Shamra, of the fourteenth or thirteenth century BCE, describe the storm-god Baal defeating Litan (Lotan), "the fleeing serpent, the twisting serpent," in almost exactly the words Isaiah 27:1 uses of Leviathan. This places the biblical creature within the wider Near Eastern Chaoskampf, the combat of a storm-god against the monster of the primeval sea, seen also in the Babylonian Tiamat. In the Hebrew scriptures the motif is subordinated to one God: Leviathan is not a rival deity but a creature, sometimes the object of divine victory (Psalm 74), sometimes simply one of God's made things at play (Psalm 104), and in Job 41 a beast whose sheer unmasterable power is paraded before Job to silence him.

The plural in Psalm 74:14, "you crushed the heads of Leviathan," has been read by some scholars as a survival of the older multi-headed serpent imagery attested for Ugaritic Litan, in contrast to the singular sea-beast of Job 41, suggesting that biblical Hebrew inherited more than one version of the monster from its Near Eastern background and did not always flatten them into a single consistent creature. Isaiah 27:1 goes further, naming "the twisting serpent" and "the dragon that is in the sea" as two objects of a single divine victory, language later rabbinic exegesis took as evidence for two Leviathans, one of each sex, rather than one.

Later tradition took Leviathan in two directions. In rabbinic and apocalyptic Judaism it becomes an eschatological figure: paired with the land-beast Behemoth and the bird Ziz, it is the primordial sea-monster whose flesh will be served to the righteous at the banquet at the end of days, its skin made into a canopy, a tradition developed in the Talmud and the midrashim and still echoed in the liturgy of Sukkot. In Christian reading Leviathan was allegorised as Satan or as the gaping mouth of hell, a jaw in medieval art. The best-known modern use inverts the image: Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan (1651) borrows the name of the unmasterable creature of Job for the sovereign commonwealth, the "mortal god" whose overwhelming power alone holds a society together. The word now carries that political sense as readily as the scriptural one.

The Babylonian Talmud, at Bava Batra 74b-75a, develops that reading of Isaiah into a fuller narrative: God is said to have created a male and a female Leviathan but then to have killed and salted away the female, since a breeding pair of such creatures would have destroyed the world, reserving her flesh, alongside Behemoth's, for the banquet of the righteous at the end of days, the tradition already noted for its afterlife in Sukkot liturgy. The same tractate is the primary rabbinic source for the skin-canopy tradition, so that a single sustained passage of Talmudic discussion accounts for most of the eschatological Leviathan material later Jewish literature repeats.