The Banquet of the Righteous, and Hobbes

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.