Leviathan and Behemoth

The two creatures are described at length in the speech that closes the book of Job, where God answers a man demanding justice with a tour of the parts of creation he did not make and cannot control. Behemoth comes first: an animal that eats grass like an ox, whose strength is in its loins, whose tail stiffens like a cedar, that lies under the lotus in the reeds and is not disturbed if a river rages. Leviathan follows at greater length, and the description is deliberately overwhelming. No hook will hold him, no harpoon will pierce his hide, his sneezing flashes light and his eyes are like the eyelids of the dawn, smoke comes out of his nostrils, he makes the deep boil like a pot, and on earth there is nothing like him, made without fear.

Elsewhere the imagery is combative rather than descriptive. A psalm speaks of God breaking the heads of the sea monsters in the waters and crushing the heads of Leviathan, giving him as food to the creatures of the wilderness. A passage in Isaiah looks forward instead, promising that on that day God will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent, and will kill the dragon that is in the sea. The language of a sea-dragon defeated at the founding of the world is shared with older Canaanite and Mesopotamian material, where the same or a closely related creature appears under names including Lotan, and the comparison is one of the most heavily worked in the study of Israelite religion in its regional setting.

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.