Biblical Beasts: Leviathan

The first question I suspect many people will have about a leviathan is, ‘What is it?’ There is, it must be said, no simple answer to this question. The earliest translation of the Old Testament, the Greek Septuagint, calls it a dragon or serpent, while the Latin Vulgate sometimes follows the Greek, and sometimes leaves the Hebrew name, Leviathan. This was the approach adopted by the translators of the King James version of the Bible, which, with its huge influence on the English language, has given us the word Leviathan.

This doesn’t get us an awful lot closer to understanding what one is though. Modern scholars have suggested it might be a crocodile, or perhaps a whale, but in fact we can see a certain significance in leaving the name untranslated. It represents something more than an ordinary animal, since it is clear from the mention of Leviathan in Isaiah 27:1 that this animal has some kind of apocalyptic significance. We could perhaps identify it, for example, with the dragon which features so prominently in the book of Revelation.

In any case, the Leviathan does seem to be some kind of sea creature or, as we might say, sea monster, and this perhaps gives us the most useful key to understanding its significance. In some ancient Near Eastern creation myths, the creation of the world was the result of a battle of the creator god with an ancient and powerful sea monster: it symbolised a power opposed to that of the creator. In the Psalms, though, the Psalmist sings to God of the Leviathan as ‘the monster you made to play with’ (Psalm 103:26). For the Lord, creation was not the result of some cosmic struggle, but a completely free act of love: thus everything in the world is the object of his delight, even sea monsters, or crocodiles, or, in short, Leviathan.