The Fifth Day, the Salted Female, and the Feast

Rabbinic tradition took the scattered scriptural references and built a connected account. The creatures were made on the fifth day of creation, and were made as a pair; because a breeding pair of such creatures would have destroyed the world, God killed the female Leviathan and salted her flesh, keeping it for the righteous in the world to come, and castrated or otherwise restrained Behemoth. At the end of days the two will fight and kill each other, and the righteous will eat their flesh at a banquet held in a booth built from the hide of Leviathan, with what is left over hung on the walls of Jerusalem so that its brightness shines to the ends of the earth. A third creature, the bird Ziz, whose ankles reach the ground when it stands and whose wings darken the sun, completes the set as the ruler of the air.

The imagery entered Jewish practice as well as speculation. The booth of Leviathan is invoked in the liturgy for the autumn festival of booths, where the temporary shelter people build is set against the shelter promised at the end, and the whole complex became a favourite subject of illuminated manuscripts, where Leviathan is drawn as a great fish biting its own tail around the edge of the scene. Christian reception took the two creatures in a different direction, reading them from the medieval period as figures of the devil, and the political theory of the seventeenth century borrowed the name of the sea creature for a state powerful enough that no one on earth can be compared to it.