Dragons, Serpents & Sea Monsters
Dragons
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Serpents
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Sea Monsters
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Tannin
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Leviathan
Permission granted to use this chapter about Leviathan from Jamin Bradley's book, Kaiju of Biblical Proportions.
The Bible begins with a brief account of creation and then the story of humanity takes over. Because of this, many are left wondering about what happened before the Genesis account began; or at least they wish they had more details about the creation story. How long had God been alone before He decided to make the heavenly host? When did Satan rebel? When did God create the waters that He hovered over in Genesis 1:2? Where do creatures like dinosaurs fit into the creation story?
We know better than to ask the question, “What happened before there was God?”—for God is eternal and not a created being—but, we often want more details as to what existence was like before humanity entered the scene. Yet on this topic, the Bible remains fairly quiet. There’s just not a lot of information in the Bible about the earth in its primeval state, and therefore, there are few theological theories we can embrace about that era of existence, outside of what we can learn through science.
One of the only primeval theories to go mainstream among scholars is what is known as “gap theory.” In this view, some have injected a gap in time between the first two verses of Genesis:
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. [Insert primeval history here.] The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. (Gen 1:1-2)
During this primeval history, gap theorist proponents argue that demons corrupted the world in verse 1, and that verse 2 shows God restoring the Earth and filling it with humanity. While gap theorists have Bible verses to support their argument,1 the view ultimately seems highly speculative and originates from a conglomerate of verses that could probably be better understood in other ways.
Not to mention the fact that the Jews of Jesus’ time believed that demons originated from the sins the sons of God committed when they procreated with human women and gave birth to the Nephilim (Gen 6:1-4). While our Bibles do not teach us that this created demons, books that our Bibles reference, like that of 1 Enoch, do (see Jude 14-16). Therefore, we see that ancient people did not see demons being created during some gap in the first two verses of Genesis, but during the flood that came in Noah’s time; for when a Nephilim died, they were thought to live on as “evil spirits” (1 En 15:8-9).
All of that being said, gap theory has a lot of interesting verses that tie into it in attempts to give it support and it is an intriguing idea. The problem with it, however, is that it requires a bit too much speculation to be made to make it feel like a legitimate idea. But what gap theory does get right, is that it tries to place a seemingly primeval character into the early pages of the Bible—that is, Leviathan.
But before we go there, we must first consider the possibilities of what exactly Leviathan might be; for scholarly speculation mutates with each of the passages that describe it.
Mythical or Real?
When we hear the word Leviathan, we are prone to have images of dinosaurs pop into our head, because we aren’t aware of any such creature in existence today. And since the name sounds so intimidating and it’s described in ways that make it sound like a dinosaur, many naturally speculate that the Bible writers were referring to some ancient, massive, dinosaur-like creature that has gone extinct. Sure, the premise sounds a bit bizarre, but it seems like a logical first conclusion for many.
But such an idea is a minority view among scholars. Their own studies have led them to see Leviathan as two different kinds of beings: (1) an aquatic creature still existing today or (2) a mythical creature. Very few seem to promote the idea that the Bible writers are describing something that they saw in their time that we have not seen today.
But while scholars are generally united on this front, they are a bit more separated on the understanding as to if Leviathan was a name for a real creature or a mythical creature. Further adding to the confusion, many scholars seem to fluctuate between these two ideas based on which Bible passage they’re reading. In one instance, they seem in agreement that Leviathan is mythical, and in another instance, they agree that it’s a specific animal; and then still, in another instance, they somewhat agree that it’s a different kind of specific animal.
In the end, it seems as though many scholars treat the word Leviathan as though it’s a blanket word for any large water creature. But is this a proper understanding of Leviathan? Does its identity really change from passage to passage? From a real life animal to a mythical creature? Or is there a bigger picture that we can find that may better encompass the few passages that reference it?
Psalm 104
Let’s start our investigation with the most nonchalant reference to Leviathan, which comes from Psalm 104.
O Lord, how manifold are your works!
In wisdom have you made them all;
the earth is full of your creatures.
Here is the sea, great and wide,
which teems with creatures innumerable,
living things both small and great.
There go the ships,
and Leviathan, which you formed to play in it. (Psalm 104:24-26)
Here we see Leviathan briefly made mention of as one sea creature amongst many others. While this may at first seem to downplay the creature, we must note that it has gained special mention here in this passage and therefore it must not be just any old sea creature—it must be spectacular enough to make reference to; like a king of the deep—even if it is cited as playing like a child.
Since scholars are prone to equate Leviathan with large aquatic animals, they often view the Leviathan of Psalm 104 as a whale. Such an animal does fit in our minds well, as it’s not hard to imagine this large creature surfacing around ships in a playful-like manner as the psalmist depicts; but does a whale really fit the mold of Leviathan? After all, the very word, Leviathan, “might be interpreted either as ‘the twisting one’…. or ‘the wreath-like’, ‘the circular’,…. both possibilities pointing to an original concept of Leviathan as a snake-like being.”2 We should keep this in mind, because a whale does not necessarily strike us as having any such features. And really, the very fact that we might qualify a whale to fit a word that by definition, doesn’t suit it, reflects our desire to cram Leviathan into a box that enlightened westerners can get behind.
While whales playfully surfacing among ships and their sailors is a pleasant image, it seems worth questioning. And while others have suggested dolphins to adhere to Leviathan’s playful nature here, such creatures don’t quite fit the bill in size or the etymological nature of the word, Leviathan.
Job 41
Of course, there’s a different theory as to what aquatic animal Leviathan is when it comes to Job 41, and that creature is certainly not one you’d want to play with. But before we reveal what creature the majority of scholars believe this version of Leviathan to be, let’s first see if we can reach the conclusion ourselves.
In Job 41 we get an entire chapter describing Leviathan; so this remains an important passage, especially given the fact that the other four say next to nothing. This chapter is framed as God describing Leviathan with His own words in an elongated poem of sorts. Again, keep your mind open as to what kind of real life aquatic creature might fit the description.
“Can you draw out Leviathan with a fishhook
or press down his tongue with a cord?
Can you put a rope in his nose
or pierce his jaw with a hook?
Will he make many pleas to you?
Will he speak to you soft words?
Will he make a covenant with you
to take him for your servant forever?
Will you play with him as with a bird,
or will you put him on a leash for your girls?
Will traders bargain over him?
Will they divide him up among the merchants?
Can you fill his skin with harpoons
or his head with fishing spears?
Lay your hands on him;
remember the battle—you will not do it again!
Behold, the hope of a man is false;
he is laid low even at the sight of him.
No one is so fierce that he dares to stir him up.
Who then is he who can stand before me?
Who has first given to me, that I should repay him?
Whatever is under the whole heaven is mine.
“I will not keep silence concerning his limbs,
or his mighty strength, or his goodly frame.
Who can strip off his outer garment?
Who would come near him with a bridle?
Who can open the doors of his face?
Around his teeth is terror.
His back is made of rows of shields,
shut up closely as with a seal.
One is so near to another
that no air can come between them.
They are joined one to another;
they clasp each other and cannot be separated.
His sneezings flash forth light,
and his eyes are like the eyelids of the dawn.
Out of his mouth go flaming torches;
sparks of fire leap forth.
Out of his nostrils comes forth smoke,
as from a boiling pot and burning rushes.
His breath kindles coals,
and a flame comes forth from his mouth.
In his neck abides strength,
and terror dances before him.
The folds of his flesh stick together,
firmly cast on him and immovable.
His heart is hard as a stone,
hard as the lower millstone.
When he raises himself up, the mighty are afraid;
at the crashing they are beside themselves.
Though the sword reaches him,
it does not avail,
nor the spear, the dart, or the javelin.
He counts iron as straw,
and bronze as rotten wood.
The arrow cannot make him flee;
for him, sling stones are turned to stubble.
Clubs are counted as stubble;
he laughs at the rattle of javelins.
His underparts are like sharp potsherds;
he spreads himself like a threshing sledge on the mire.
He makes the deep boil like a pot;
he makes the sea like a pot of ointment.
Behind him he leaves a shining wake;
one would think the deep to be white-haired.
On earth there is not his like,
a creature without fear.
He sees everything that is high;
he is king over all the sons of pride.”
Now that you’ve read the entire passage, what sea creature do you think scholars believe Job 41 is poetically describing? If you guessed crocodile, then you’re right! Though to be honest, I struggle to see how you came to that conclusion. I mean, I can see bits and pieces that seem to relate to the crocodile, but could I ever conceive of a version of myself that would have finished reading this poem in its fullness and come to the conclusion that everything fit the description of a crocodile perfectly? No.
Honestly, my first conclusion was that Leviathan was some kind of fantasy-like dragon or reptilian water creature,3 namely because of the fact that, to reiterate on what we just read:
His sneezings flash forth light, and his eyes are like the eyelids of the dawn. Out of his mouth go flaming torches; sparks of fire leap forth. Out of his nostrils comes forth smoke, as from a boiling pot and burning rushes. His breath kindles coals, and a flame comes forth from his mouth. (Job 41:18-21)
As one commentarian can’t help but note (even though he seems to agree with the crocodile identity), “This sounds like the description of the dragon that is found in many ancient tales.”4 He’s right. Many of us might have even imagined a cartoon dragon snorting fire out of its nose as we read that passage. Therefore, identifying this Leviathan as a crocodile causes us to wonder if crocodiles were capable of very different things a few thousand years ago.
But then again, the crocodile theory does have its own merits. The theory’s first line of reasoning, is that Job 41 has poetic structure to it, and most poems take on a certain amount of artistic license. Therefore, if we were able to look at the more dragon-esque descriptions of Leviathan as hyperbole, we just might be able to understand the rest as referencing a crocodile. After all, the crocodile is a fearsome, strong, scaly, dangerous creature with hard skin and a big mouth—these things we can get behind. But almost every line still feels like incredible hyperbole—as though we’re trying to turn a kraken into a shark.
But still, to make sense of the dragon-sounding language, William Reyburn draws parallels between what Job says and the way in which crocodiles live.
His sneezings flash forth light describes the effect of Leviathan’s sneezing. Ancient writers observed that when the crocodile sneezed, tiny drops of water that sprayed the air caused the light to sparkle. His sneezings translates a word found nowhere else in the Old Testament, but is clearly related to the Aramaic and Arabic verbs with the same meaning. The Hebrew word ’aTisha resembles the sound made by a sneeze.5
While such metaphors seem fair to make since, again, Job 41 is written with poetic structure, I still have to agree with another scholar that,
even allowing for poetic license, this makes God guilty of considerable exaggeration. For leviathan is invulnerable to human weapons, his eyes and nose flash with light, and fire pours out of his mouth. He is covered with armor and is lord of all creatures. This is more like a terrible dragon than a crocodile.6
Living in Michigan, I don’t know much about crocodiles and the like, but I do recall visiting an alligator farm in Florida. While there, the owners of the farm worked very hard to try to convince us that alligators were not as dangerous as they might seem. By the end of their lecture I actually believed them—perhaps too much. For when my family came across an alligator that was in the middle of a path on that alligator farm, my brother, my dad, my grandpa and myself, proceeded to (in hindsight, very stupidly) step directly over the alligator and continue on our way.
Perhaps alligators and crocodiles are vastly different in temperament or danger–I don’t know. All I know is that the five of us faced Leviathan’s cousin and it was nothing like Job 41—nor was it my last moment on earth.
Still, I admit that the crocodile theory can be somewhat compelling for a few reasons. First off, there is no Hebrew word for crocodile and so Leviathan could be a way to describe it.7 And secondly, “The crocodile was regarded as sacred by the Egyptians, as it was also one of their most dreaded objects,”8 which therefore elevates it above other creatures in ancient thinking. But this identity still seems like a stretch to me. Granted, I would agree that, “If a real animal is in view here, it is probably the crocodile.”9
The Gods Are Afraid
One of the reasons I would conclude that Leviathan is more likely to be a mythical creature is because it has its roots in mythology outside of Israelite religion (which we’ll get to next), and I think its mythical properties can be seen quite well in Job 41—especially when God says that, “When he raises himself up, the mighty are afraid; at the crashing they are beside themselves” (Job 41:25).
I’d like to draw our attention here to the Hebrew word ’elim, which is the word that gets translated into “mighty.” While mighty can be an appropriate translation here, Bible translators point out that it is also acceptable to translate this word as “gods.” As Reyburn explains,
The use of “gods” within the context of the increasing awesomeness of this creature is fully natural. Therefore the Hebrew may be interpreted to mean “gods,”…. [The New Jerusalem Version] has “divine beings.” We may translate the first line as “When he (Leviathan) rises up, even the gods are frightened.”10
Now if this is what Job was communicating (and it very well may be so) then it becomes very easy to see Leviathan as a mythical creature; for the “gods” would not shiver in their boots at the sight of a crocodile—but a dragon-like creature that matched Job’s actual description? Well that’s a different story. Not to mention that Leviathan has its roots in a Canaanite story where it is thought to be seen as a being at war with the gods.
But why would Job be talking about the gods? Isn’t he and the rest of the Bible monotheist? Yes, absolutely. The Bible completely teaches that there is only one God, Yahweh, who has created everything that exists, both in the physical realm and the spiritual realm. Nothing can exist without Him. However, the Bible also paints a portrait with passages like Deuteronomy 32:8-9 and Psalm 82 to show us that God has given power and authority to spiritual beings that he created to rule over the nations. Bible writers knew these spiritual beings by all different kinds of names: principalities and powers, angels, demons, and yes, even the term, “gods.” By no means are they like Yahweh—they don’t come anywhere close—but since they have spiritual power and reign over humanity, their recognition as “little-g-gods” is quite common throughout the Bible.11
This further shows us why Israel’s chief sin was idolatry. They didn’t just turn away from God to go worship statues made by their own hands, rather they kept getting seduced by real fallen spiritual entities that God had made and kept turning to worship them instead of God. With all of this in mind, it is not unbiblical or heretical for the book of Job to make reference to “the gods.” Job is a monotheist just like all the other Bible writers.
But there is perhaps another reason we are more apt to see the book of Job make reference to the gods and to Leviathan; for it’s possible that Job was not an Israelite. While the book’s “use of the divine name Yahweh indicates it was written, or at least edited, by a member of God’s people,”12 all we really know about Job is that he “was a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job, and that man was blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil” (Job 1:1).
In his book, The Star of Bethlehem, Michael Allan Pettem concludes that Job was not an Israelite because of the different astrological signs Job mentions. Since astrology was strictly forbidden among Israelites, you don’t see much mention of the names of heavenly objects in the Old Testament. Even the sun and the moon in Genesis 1:16 are called the “greater light” and the “lesser light.” But Job throws caution to the wind and talks about constellations like Pleiades and Orion (Job 38:31). Pettem goes on to explain that,
The distinction between Job and Israelites has great importance. Those who transmitted the Bible see that no righteous Israelite ever pronounce the names of the stars, except in praise of the power and greatness of God or in ridicule of the king of Babylon or in ridicule of the worship of star gods. But Job on the other hand, who is not an Israelite, can dispute with God at length, and God answers him, and both make reference to several explicitly named heavenly bodies. This way of speaking was appropriate to a righteous man who was not an Israelite. His astronomical knowledge is respected, and God enters into the dispute also using it. Here is important Old Testament background for understanding how Matthew can accept that the Magi follow a star. They, like Job, are not Israelites. They, like Job, can be good men and know the stars.13
Others like Carl Friedrich Keil chime in on Job’s outside references as well, stating that, “direct references to events in the history of Israel are contrary to the character of the book [of Job], which, with remarkable consistency, avoids everything that is at all Israelitish.”14
With this thought in mind, I suggest that God’s conversation with Job about Leviathan comes from a similar light. Here, God is talking to Job about Leviathan as though it’s a part of his belief system, while subjecting that system to Job’s monotheistic belief in Yahweh; for God’s ultimate point in bringing up Leviathan is that nothing can compete or compare with Him, even this ultimate mythical creature of the deep. Job has now come to the full realization that God can do all things and that no purpose of His can be thwarted (Job 42:2).
Space Dragon
Further evidencing Job’s creature to be mythical is the fact that Job 41 is not the first time his book references Leviathan. While Job 41 is the most in-depth passage in the Bible on Leviathan, Job had mentioned this kaiju once before towards the beginning of his book.
After Job had taken on a great amount of suffering, his bitterness drove him into a pit of despair and depression. While there, he began to curse his own life and wish that he had never been born. And within this curse, he beckons Leviathan to play a part in his ruin.
“Let the day perish on which I was born,
and the night that said,
‘A man is conceived.’
Let that day be darkness!
May God above not seek it,
nor light shine upon it.
Let gloom and deep darkness claim it.
Let clouds dwell upon it;
let the blackness of the day terrify it.
That night—let thick darkness seize it!
Let it not rejoice among the days of the year;
let it not come into the number of the months.
Behold, let that night be barren;
let no joyful cry enter it.
Let those curse it who curse the day,
who are ready to rouse up Leviathan.
Let the stars of its dawn be dark;
let it hope for light, but have none,
nor see the eyelids of the morning,
because it did not shut the doors of my mother’s womb,
nor hide trouble from my eyes. (Job 3:1-10)
Ironically enough, while the majority of scholars see the Leviathan of Job 41 as a crocodile, the majority of scholars also see the Leviathan of Job 3 as a mythical creature. They come to this conclusion because Job connects Leviathan to his depression in two specific ways. The first way is seen in the fact that Job asks those “who curse the day” (i.e. sorcerers) to rouse up Leviathan. In invoking this curse, Job connects this creature of chaos and darkness straight to the works of magic and the dark arts. Like Balaam in Numbers 22, whose curses and blessings were known to stick on people, Job wants someone of the sort to bring upon him the entire weight of Leviathan.
This creature will then continue to bring about chaos with an astrological sign. This is the second way we see fantastical elements within Job’s Leviathan; for Job wants to be submerged in a primeval darkness that’s so strong it blots out celestial objects. Since Leviathan is a tangent within this theme we find ourselves turning to an old myth about how eclipses were brought on by dragons eating the sun. As Keil points out,
According to vulgar superstition, from which the imagery of v. 8 is borrowed, there was a special art of exciting the dragon, which is the enemy of sun and moon, against them both, so that, by its devouring them, total darkness prevails. The dragon is called in Hindu râhu; the Chinese, and also the natives of Algeria, even at the present day make a wild tumult with drums and copper vessels when an eclipse of the sun or moon occurs, until the dragon will release his prey. Job wishes that this monster may swallow up the sun of his birth-day.15
We shouldn’t be surprised that scholars can see dragon elements in Job 3, because, again, Job 41 sounds exactly like the description of a dragon. But this is not the only dragon myth that Leviathan is thought to be encompassing; for the myth that Leviathan is best known for is a Canaanite one where it fights with the false gods in a primeval state. And it’s to this myth that we now turn.
Chaoskampf
In theological circles there are myths that have come to be known today as chaoskampf. This German word, meaning, “‘battle against chaos,’ is often used as a technical term in biblical scholarship to refer to [the] story pattern of a deity battling the forces of chaos, either in the form of the sea or a sea monster.”16
While this theme may sound unusual to us because our Bibles start with the story of God speaking life into being, some other passages in the Bible seem to insert chaoskampf themes into the Genesis account. It’s in these passages that we seem to see God engaging in primeval battles with mythical sea monsters.17 Psalm 74 is one of these passages. But before we jump into this Psalm, it’s helpful to know a little bit about the story of Baal, the false god that Israel was seduced into worshipping so often in the Old Testament.
In ancient literature known as the Baal Cycle, Baal is seen as the god of storms and agriculture. And while the order of the story of the Baal Cycle is debated,18 the general premise is that Baal was one of many gods who rose in power among the other gods. In order to do this, Baal first had to fight and defeat Yam, the seven-headed,19 god of the sea.20 After having done so, he then dismembered and dispersed Yam’s body parts. Sometime later, Baal built a house and “The story climaxes with Baal ‘enthroned in his house’ as ‘the one who reigns over the gods.’”21
The story goes on, but what’s of special interest to us here is that Yam is at one point referred to by another name: Litan—which in Ugarit (a close relative of the Hebrew language) is the equivalent of the Hebrew word, Leviathan.22
Psalm 74
The backdrop of the Baal Cycle is incredibly important to our reading of Psalm 74, which we will now divide into three parts based on the advice of scholar, Nathaniel E. Greene.23 The reason we will do this is because the middle section of this Psalm on Leviathan is where our focus will be, and scholars are divided as to what this middle section is referring to. Because it speaks of “dividing the sea,” many will naturally think of Moses and the Israelites crossing the Red Sea. But when read in the context of the rest of the Psalm, we can actually see that the reference is to God creating the world by dividing the waters at creation. Therefore, we’ll put Greene’s headings over each section of the Psalm as we read it to keep it in context.
Greene sees the first section of this Psalm as being about the Jews writing from exile after Solomon’s temple had been destroyed. The second part is about God fighting with a mythological beast. The third part is the Psalmist's request that God come help the poor. This structure may seem unimportant, but reading Psalm 74 under these headings will help us see its progression, and furthermore, its reasoning for bringing up Leviathan.
Lament Over the Destruction of the Temple
O God, why do you cast us off forever?
Why does your anger smoke against the sheep of your pasture?
Remember your congregation, which you have purchased of old,
which you have redeemed to be the tribe of your heritage!
Remember Mount Zion, where you have dwelt.
Direct your steps to the perpetual ruins;
the enemy has destroyed everything in the sanctuary!Your foes have roared in the midst of your meeting place;
they set up their own signs for signs.
They were like those who swing axes
in a forest of trees.
And all its carved wood
they broke down with hatchets and hammers.
They set your sanctuary on fire;
they profaned the dwelling place of your name,
bringing it down to the ground.
They said to themselves, “We will utterly subdue them”;
they burned all the meeting places of God in the land.We do not see our signs;
there is no longer any prophet,
and there is none among us who knows how long.
How long, O God, is the foe to scoff?
Is the enemy to revile your name forever?
Why do you hold back your hand, your right hand?
Take it from the fold of your garment and destroy them!
Mythological Hymn Detailing the Context Between God and Mythological Beasts
Yet God my King is from of old,
working salvation in the midst of the earth.
You divided the sea by your might;
you broke the heads of the sea monsters on the waters.
You crushed the heads of Leviathan;
you gave him as food for the creatures of the wilderness.
You split open springs and brooks;
you dried up ever-flowing streams.
Yours is the day, yours also the night;
you have established the heavenly lights and the sun.
You have fixed all the boundaries of the earth;
you have made summer and winter.Remember this, O Lord, how the enemy scoffs,
and a foolish people reviles your name.
Petition for God to Act on Behalf of the Poor
Do not deliver the soul of your dove to the wild beasts;
do not forget the life of your poor forever.
Have regard for the covenant,
for the dark places of the land are full of the habitations of violence.
Let not the downtrodden turn back in shame;
let the poor and needy praise your name.
Arise, O God, defend your cause;
remember how the foolish scoff at you all the day!
Do not forget the clamor of your foes,
the uproar of those who rise against you, which goes up continually!
Now that we’ve read the Psalm, let’s revisit how these three segments interlock together. In Greene’s thinking,
The author perceived a theological connection between God’s conflict with the mythological beasts and creation not only of the world but of a temple for God. To the author, the temple was a microcosm of creation—the throne upon which God reigns…. The author likely hoped that the reuse of inherited creation mythology (so as to remind God of divine actions “of old”) would cause the deity to engage in the battle once again, leading to the reestablishment of God’s reign and the reconstruction of God’s temple.24
Greene helps us cement the Psalmist’s words about Leviathan as a reference to creation, not to Moses and the Red Sea—though if we really wanted, we could count the Psalmist’s reference of “dividing the sea” as a double entendre to both stories, since both are tales of God ending chaos.
But even without Greene’s oversight, this Psalm is so full of language that hearkens back to the creation story that it’s really quite easy to see it as a reference to Genesis. God is recorded as a King from old, causing us to think of the earliest of times; He shifts the waters to His liking; He creates the sun and moon; He fixes the boundaries of the earth; He sets the seasons into order. As Greene notes, even the Hebrew verb that creates the expression “you have made summer and winter” carries the same root as Genesis 2:7-8, where God forms man and woman from the dust.25
And it's there in his revisiting of the creation story that the Psalmist interjects a part of the Baal Cycle into his poem. Except here we find that instead of Baal conquering the sea, Yahweh Himself is pictured as the one doing so. Yahweh has divided the sea by His might. Yahweh has broken the heads of the sea monsters on the waters. Yahweh has crushed the heads of Leviathan. He has subdued chaos in its primeval state.
It may seem odd that an Israelite would borrow a story from another religion until you begin to see the possible reasons as to why. The first is to use an ancient tale that ancient people knew in order to illustrate to the world that Yahweh is actually the one who brings order out of chaos. The second, is to take a story that people credit to a false god and instead credit it to Yahweh as a way of insulting that god and usurping their authority. As semitics expert and Bible scholar Michael Heiser points out,
Old Testament writers…. use sources or known content to their audience. One of the ways this happens is with the use of ancient Near Eastern myths. Now, peoples like the Egyptians, the Sumerians, the Akkadians, the Babylonians, so on and so forth had mythical epics that they would write to explain… to their audience (their own culture) how things came to be. They deal with creation. They deal with cosmology, how reality that they experienced is structured…. how it came into existence, who are the gods and what’s their relationship to man, and all these sorts of things….
often the biblical writers will either draw material from that material, or they will sort of mimic it as they go for a specific polemic purpose. What I mean by that is, for instance, there are psalms, there are places again in the books of Kings where the biblical writer will take little snippets of the Baal Cycle, the Baal Epic, and bring it into the biblical material and do things to it that are dismissive of Baal and that elevate Yahweh above Baal….The audience would know exactly what the writer’s doing. “You’re using that to make a theological point about Yahweh and to diss Baal."26
The elevation of Yahweh over both Baal and Leviathan are further seen in other ways. For example, Baal had to use a weapon of supernatural strength built by a craftsman god to defeat Leviathan. And when that first weapon didn’t succeed, Baal had to use a second weapon that was crafted for him. But God simply crushes the heads of Leviathan with his might. He has no need for a weapon.
Furthermore, as we’ve already seen in Job 41 and Psalm 104, Leviathan is like nothing in comparison to God. While humans may be afraid to play with Leviathan “as with a bird,” and fathers would never consider putting him “on a leash for their girls” (Job 41:5), that’s exactly how docile this being is in comparison to God’s strength. While even the gods are afraid of Leviathan, Yahweh Himself is out taking him on a walk, like a pet. In comparison to God’s invincible strength, Leviathan is pictured as doing nothing more than playing in the sea (Ps 104:26).
These kinds of things are at the heart of Psalm 74. It is not a tale of the Red Sea, nor a story about a whale, a crocodile, or an allegorical statement about Egypt and its kings as some have suggested.27 Just because a sea monster of mythological and supernatural proportions makes our culture uncomfortable does not mean that the Bible writers didn’t have such a thing in mind. We should be able to see that these writers simply took the myth of Leviathan as it was and subjected it before God in a new light and with a new purpose.
And since we have now established this creature as a myth with a meaning (or possibly as a “‘supernatural’ creature (like cherubim) as opposed to natural or purely mythological”)28 we can now look at it in another dimension the Bible writers hoped to convey. And this time we’ll find Leviathan not at the beginning of the creation story, but at the end of time.
Isaiah 27
Since we’re looking for meaning in the Bible’s passages about Leviathan, we shouldn’t be looking for canon. For if we were looking for a canonical story about this creature, we’d have to say God killed him when He created the world (as we just noted in Psalm 74), and yet he’s still alive today. This would only get even more confusing after reading Isaiah 27:1 where God kills Leviathan in the end-times.
In that day the Lord with his hard and great and strong sword will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent, and he will slay the dragon that is in the sea. (Emphasis mine.)
Now just in case you’re still wondering if the seven-headed Leviathan of Psalm 74 is really a reference to the mythological Canaanite creature, Isaiah should put your wondering to rest. For the prophet’s mention of Leviathan carries with it a direct reference to Canaanite literature.
When you killed Litan, the Fleeing Serpent,
Annihilated the Twisty Serpent,
The Potentate with Seven Heads,
The heavens grew hot, they withered. (Emphasis mine.)29
While we’ve already seen that the word Leviathan etymologically means something like “twisting one,” Isaiah has gone one step beyond simple definition by calling him a “fleeing serpent.” In quoting this Canaanite literature, it becomes clear here that Isaiah is making reference to something his listeners recognize—the Canaanite mythological seven-headed chaos dragon of the deep: Litan. Or again, as it’s known in Hebrew, Leviathan.
It’s here that Isaiah promises that God will one day end this creature once and for all. But why will God punish Leviathan? It’s because he’s a chaos creature. The sea in general is known for its chaos rather than its order, and God is a God of order as the apostle Paul constantly points out. And since Leviathan is, in a sense, the god of the sea, this creature must not only be punished, but ended completely! He is a figure representative of everything that is wrong with the world. He is an emblem of Sin itself, looking to wreak havoc on creation.
But what’s also of interest here is the fact that Isaiah used a different Hebrew word for serpent than we would expect him to use when he translated his words from Ugarit to Hebrew. Based on the Ugaritic word used for serpent, we would expect Isaiah to use the Hebrew word, pethen, for a venomous serpent.30 However, he instead uses the Hebrew word, nachash, which hearkens back to many verses in the Bible, including the serpent as we see him in the Garden of Eden—the creature that Revelation identifies as “the great dragon,…. that ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan” (Rev 12:9).
Revelation 12
Eugene Peterson prepares us to step into Revelation with the previous 65 books already in mind; because John, its author, is ready to cite Bible passages with a passion.
Pastor John of Patmos knew his Bible inside and out. The Revelation has 404 verses. In those 404 verses there are 518 references to earlier Scriptures, but there is not a single direct quote; all the references are allusions. Here is a pastor who was absolutely immersed in Scripture and submits himself to it. He does not just repeat, regurgitate or sight-proof texts. As he preaches, the Scriptures are recreated in him. He first assimilates Scripture and then lives and preaches the Scripture he had internalized.31
Peterson is right. One is hard pressed to find a few words go by without some kind of allusion to a Bible passage. John is pulling references from left and right. With this in mind, it’s not unthinkable to see our current conversation of Leviathan resurface, especially given the fact that Isaiah said God would deal with Leviathan in the end-times. And sure enough, we see him boldly and chaotically enter into the story.
And another sign appeared in heaven: behold, a great red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns, and on his heads seven diadems. (Rev 12:3)
This seven-headed dragon seems an obvious callback to Leviathan, though this time he is identified as “that ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world” (Rev 12:9). He and his kaiju entourage have come to Earth and are wreaking chaos upon it. They are the opposite of God and therefore, the opposite of order. They want the violent and moral ruin of humanity. The creature that Isaiah prophesied God would slay now shows his many faces in Revelation 12, and no one can miss it.
Of course, Satan isn’t the only seven-headed creature in Revelation; for one of Satan’s minions, the first beast, rises “out of the sea, with…. seven heads” (Rev 13:1). In fact, this creature seems even more intentionally linked to Leviathan because of its association with the sea. This beast however, isn’t any less an allusion to Satan, for it is, in a sense, a mirror of Satan. This first beast leads people to worship both himself and the dragon known as Satan (Rev 13:4), further evidencing their connection as the same force, or at the very least, the same theme.
And yet we rarely seem to make these connections—though it’s easy to see why. While it makes sense that John would put an apocalyptic passage from Isaiah into his own apocalypse, there are so many hybrid creatures in his book already that we can easily get lost in the description. We’re so busy counting heads and trying to assign numerological meaning to things that we forget to stand back and stare at the dragon. The Greeks would have recognized him as Hydra, but those who knew their Bible knew that this was the thing Hydra was based off of: Leviathan himself.
This doesn’t mean it’s inappropriate to look for meaning in the dragon and the first beast’s seven heads (for such creatures do not wear crowns and metaphor is therefore implied), but to ignore the image in its whole is to miss the wider portrait John is drawing. The author, in his genius, is painting revelatory layer after layer to create an apocalyptic masterpiece of allegory.
The name Satan is attached to the dragon, whom Leviathan serves. Therefore, everything that Satan represents is found in Leviathan. He wars with God, though God holds all power over him and can (and will) crush him. From a strength standpoint, Satan is no more than a puppy on a leash, though he causes humanity and gods alike to fear and follow him. He is here to destroy creation and is the embodiment of all that the sea ever stood for in the ancient world. As Heiser points out,
In the ancient world the sea was a thing of dread. It was unpredictable and untamable. It was a place upon which humans couldn’t live. Consequently, the sea was often used as a metaphor for chaos, destruction, and death. The power and chaotic unruliness of the sea was symbolized in both the Old Testament and a wide range of ancient Near Eastern literatures with a dragon or sea monster, variously known as Leviathan and Rahab (e.g., Pss 74:14; 89:10).
Sea imagery conveys these ideas from the very beginning of the Bible. The waters of the primeval deep (Gen 1:2) must be calmed and restrained by God. The defeat of the gods of Egypt happens when the sea obeys its Maker (Exod 14). Jesus walks on the sea and instantly brings it into submission. To the ancient mind these incidents symbolized power over chaos and everything that might bring harm and death to humanity.32
In contrast to the sea, God is order—the antithesis of chaos. This is easily seen in the fact that Revelation paints the waters before God’s throne as “a sea of glass, like crystal” (Rev 4:6). As Gordon Fee notes, “it has clearly been tamed.”33 And even when this “sea of glass” is enraged, it’s not turned into chaotic, unruly waters; rather, it remains a “sea of glass,” but becomes “mingled with fire” (Rev 15:2).
And so, in order to end chaos once and for all, God must slay the twisting, fleeing, Satanic Leviathan. He is thrown into a lake of fire (Rev 20:10), along with Death itself (Rev 20:14), and the entire cosmos finally becomes all it was meant to be and more. God makes “a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more” (Rev 21:1)—and along with that, everything the sea represented. Chaos is dead. Yam is dead. Litan is dead. Leviathan is dead. Satan is dead. Even death itself is dead. God has crushed Leviathan’s seven heads and has given “him as food for the creatures of the wilderness” (Psalm 74:14).34 All that lives on is of God and His order, which includes His people who take on new resurrected bodies.
Footnotes
1 For more details see, Gregory A. Boyd and Paul R. Eddy. Across the Spectrum: Understanding Issues in Evangelical Theology (Kindle Locations 940-1025). Kindle Edition. Also see chapter 3, “Slaying Leviathan,” in Greg Boyd’s book, God at War: The Bible & Spiritual Conflict. See especially the section of this chapter that falls under the heading, “Original creation or restoration?”
2 Uehlinger, C. “Leviathan.” Ed. Karel van der Toorn, Bob Becking, and Pieter W. van der Horst. Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible. Grand Rapids, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1999. p. 511.
3 Biblically, a dragon could be seen as a water creature. We often think of dragons today as flying, mountainous creatures, but Ezekiel 29:3 speaks of Pharaoh as “the great dragon that lies in the midst of his streams.” While this is metaphor, it seems the poet does not see a fault with placing a dragon underwater, and understood it as an obvious continuation of his metaphor that everyone would understand.
4 Alden, Robert L. Job. The New American Commentary. Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1993, p. 404.
5 Reyburn, William David. A Handbook on the Book of Job. UBS Handbook Series. New York, United Bible Societies, 1992. p. 760.
6 Garrett, Duane A. Ed. David S. Dockery. “The Poetic and Wisdom Books.” Holman Concise Bible Commentary. Nashville, Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1998, p. 211.
7 Keil, Carl Friedrich, and Franz Delitzsch. Commentary on the Old Testament. Peabody, Hendrickson, 1996, p. 691.
8 Hart, Henry Chichester. The Animals Mentioned in the Bible. London, The Religious Tract Society, 1888, p. 143.
9 Schultz, Carl. “Job.” Evangelical Commentary on the Bible. Grand Rapids, Baker Book House, 1995, p. 365.
10 Reyburn, A Handbook on the Book of Job. pp. 763-764.
11 See Michael Heiser’s book, The Unseen Realm, or Greg Boyd’s book, God at War.
12 Barry, John D. et al. “Introduction to Job." Faithlife Study Bible. Bellingham, Lexham Press, 2016.
13 Pettem, Michael Allan. The Star of Bethlehem: Science, History, and Meaning. Bellingham, Lexham Press, 2018.
14 Keil, Commentary on the Old Testament. p. 327.
15 Keil, Commentary on the Old Testament. p. 286.
16 Ed. John D. Barry et al. “Chaos.” The Lexham Bible Dictionary. Bellingham, Lexham Press, 2016.
17 Such passages are used by gap-theorists to support their speculation.
18 For more information on this, see, Balogh, Amy L., and Douglas Mangum. “Baal Cycle.” The Lexham Bible Dictionary.
19 If you’re thinking of the Greek creature, Hydra, you’re on the right track. “A seven-headed serpent…. partly overcome by an anthropomorphic hero or god is attested as early as the third mill. bce in Mesopotamian iconography…. and texts, …. but later survives in the textual records only, until he reappears in the Greek Hydra tradition from the 6th century on. (Uehlinger, C. “Leviathan.” Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible. p. 512.) While Hydra is known to have nine heads, it wouldn’t be surprising to find out that its roots are in the Canaanite legend.
20 The fact that Yam/Leviathan may have been seen as a god may make us feel uncomfortable. It seems to have made the Jews of Jesus’ time uncomfortable too, which is evidenced in the fact that the Septuagint (i.e. the Greek translation of the Bible that Jesus and the New Testament authors knew) often turned supernatural beings known as “the sons of God” into angels. In a similar way, the Septuagint changed Leviathan into other kinds of creatures, perhaps because they saw a divinity in Leviathan that they did not want their Scriptures to acknowledge: Job 3:9 calls Leviathan a great fish; Job 41:1 translates Leviathan into a serpent; Psalm 74:14 seems to completely skip the line that mentions Leviathan; and Psalm 104:26 changes Leviathan into a dragon, as does Isaiah 27:1.
21 Balogh, Amy L., and Douglas Mangum. “Baal Cycle.” The Lexham Bible Dictionary.
22 Boxall, Ian. The Revelation of Saint John. Black’s New Testament Commentary. London, Continuum, 2006, p. 179.
23 Nathaniel E. Greene. “Creation, Destruction, and a Psalmist's Plea: Rethinking the Poetic Structure of Psalm 74.” Journal of Biblical Literature. Vol. 136, No. 1, 2017, pp. 85–101. www.jstor.org/stable/10.15699/jbl.1361.2017.156672.
24 Ibid. pp.100-101.
25 Ibid. p. 92.
26 Heiser, Michael S. OT281 How We Got the Old Testament. Logos Mobile Education. Bellingham, Lexham Press, 2014.
27 Mythical creatures can indeed be metaphors for people groups, however, that does not appear to be the best understanding of Leviathan here in this particular passage.
28 Matthews, Victor Harold, Mark W. Chavalas, and John H. Walton. “Job 41:1.” The IVP Bible Background Commentary: Old Testament. Downers Grove, InterVarsity Press, 2000.
29 KTU 1.5, col. i, lines 1–4. translation from Smith and Parker, Ugaritic Narrative Poetry, 141.
30 Mangum, Douglas, and Matthew James Hamilton. “Leviathan.” The Lexham Bible Dictionary.
31 Peterson, Eugene H. As Kingfishers Catch Fire: A Conversation on the Ways of God Formed by the Words of God. New York, Waterbrook, 2017, p. 323.
32 See Heiser, Michael S. The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible. Bellingham, Lexham Press, 2015, p. 382-383.
33 Fee, Gordon D. Revelation. New Covenant Commentary Series. Eugene, Cascade Books, 2011, p. 71.
34 Some passages in Jewish books like Baruch 29:4 and possibly 4 Ezra 6:49-52 seemed to take this statement in their own eschatological fashion, and pictured the righteous as eating the bodies of these entities. John doesn’t doesn’t go to that extent in Revelation though.
Rahab
written by Jamin Bradley
When people think of Rahab in the Bible, their minds often go to the story of Jericho, where a prostitute by the same name helped some Israelite spies escape from her town in exchange for her family’s life when Israel later attacked it. But this is not the only Rahab in the Bible. There is another that is identified as a sea creature that seems very similar to Leviathan. In fact, they are so similar that many scholars conclude that Rahab and Leviathan are different names for the same entity—or at the very least they consider them to be representative of the same general themes.
This is a fair assumption to make as there are some very easy parallels to see between the two creatures. However, since Job and Isaiah mention both of these creatures individually, let’s begin our research with the premise that there may be some kind of dividing line between the two.
No Search Results Found
You’ll recall that there are some pretty solid reasons to identify Leviathan with the water creature found in the Baal Cycle—especially the fact that Litan in the Baal Cycle is Ugaritic for Leviathan. Rahab, however, has no such connection. There are no names in any ancient mythologies that we have on record that are the Hebrew equivalent of Rahab, though we might speculate that there once were.1
We do, however, have a reference to Rahab as a “fleeing serpent” (Job 26:13), which should immediately catch our attention given that both the Baal Cycle and Isaiah 27:1 described Leviathan as a “fleeing serpent.” This is the first connection we will see between Leviathan and Rahab, and it’s a pretty big one; for fleeing seems to imply some kind of backstory, and neither Job nor Isaiah feel the need to explain that backstory because they expect their audience to understand.
Already our two characters are blending into one. And that’s okay, because to some extent they serve a similar mythological purpose in the story of God. But I think there are still some differences between the two characters, and elaboration on these differences may help us widen the scope of the Biblical meaning behind them.
Cosmogony
In our last chapter we learned about chaoskampf, which again, is a literary motif referencing a battle with chaos. Now we must take this motif a step further, for there’s a possibility that Rahab takes us into another motif that often accompanies chaoskampf, known as cosmogony. A cosmogony is a theory or a myth as to how the cosmos was created.2 These two themes are connected by the fact that it was not uncommon in the ancient world for a battle with chaos to lead to the creation of the world.
At the center of our focus now is the cosmogony found in the Mesopotamian creation myth known as, Enūma Eliš. In this story, two restful beings named Apsu and Tiamat are seen as the primordial waters of the earth.3 This makes sense of Tiamat’s name, since it is more or less an Akkadian word for the sea. These two water beings give birth to loud and lively gods that begin to disrupt Apsu and Tiamat’s rest. This eventually compels the two to come up with a plan to kill their godly children.
One of the gods, named Ea, responded to this threat by killing Apsu, which in turn caused Tiamat to raise “an army of horrid creatures.”4 The gods then appointed Ea’s son—Marduk, the storm god—to fight Tiamat and her army. With a strong wind, a net, and a bow and arrow, Marduk killed Tiamat and then used her corpse to create part of the world.
Job 9
While it’s hard to be entirely sure, there are a few elements in Enūma Eliš that are more prone to make us think of Rahab than of Leviathan. Take Job 9:13 for example. It states, “beneath him bowed the helpers of Rahab.”5 With the Enūma Eliš myth freshly in our minds, we might find ourselves agreeing with those that “say that this picture of Rahab as having ‘assistants’ or allies indicates a borrowing of the Babylonian creation account in which Tiamat had her helpers.”6 And this is not the only place we may find reference to Rahab’s helpers, for Psalm 40:4 may continue this theme.
Blessed is the man who makes
the Lord his trust,
who does not turn to the proud,
to those who go astray after a lie! (Emphasis mine)
While we can’t see it in English, the Hebrew word for proud here is the plural, rĕhābîm, which “can be interpreted as referring to demonic forces related to Rahab.”7 But Rahab’s helpers are not the only element linking Rahab to the Mesopotamian story.
Tiamat's Body
It seems odd to think that there might be any connection between Yahweh creating the world in Genesis and Marduk’s cosmogony with Tiamat, yet we do seem to see such lines being drawn. For after Tiamat had been killed,
The body of the dead Tiāmat was split like a fish to be dried into two halves, one of which became the sky. Having positioned the celestial bodies, Marduk used Tiāmat’s spit for clouds, placed a mountain on her head, and made an outlet from her eyes for the waters of the Euphrates and the Tigris.8
The connection we’re looking for here is seen in the fact that, “In the ancient Near East, people conceived of the structure of the universe differently than the modern conception. People thought of a solid, dome-like structure encircling and enclosing the earth.”9 They saw “the sky as a hard vault holding up water with ‘windows’ or ‘floodgates’ that allow for rain.”10 This shouldn’t be entirely shocking to us, for Genesis imagined an expanse of sorts between the waters above and below the land. As Genesis 1:6-7 states,
“Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.” And God made the expanse and separated the waters that were under the expanse from the waters that were above the expanse.
For the Mesopotamians, Marduk separated the waters from the waters by using Tiamat’s body. For the Hebrews, God separated the waters from the waters by using His very words. Despite the differences between the two stories, both have divinities separating the hostile waters below from the hostile waters above by setting an expanse in between them. Therefore, we can see somewhat of a loose connection to Tiamat in Genesis.
But this connection is strengthened by the fact that “A common Semitic word for “sea” may lie behind the Hebrew tehom and the Akkadian Tiamat.”11 Tehom is the Hebrew word for "the deep”—as in, “the deep waters” that God hovered over in the beginning of Genesis and then later separated. Therefore, language studies leave the possibility that all of these words could be used as substitutes for one another—God separated the deep/the sea/tehom/Tiamat. We continue to see this connection play out in a few more Bible passages.
The Skies
While we’ve already noted that Job 26:13 calls Rahab a fleeing serpent, we now need to zoom out a little bit more and take in the wider context of this passage.
He stretches out the north over the void
and hangs the earth on nothing.
He binds up the waters in his thick clouds,
and the cloud is not split open under them.
He covers the face of the full moon
and spreads over it his cloud.
He has inscribed a circle on the face of the waters
at the boundary between light and darkness.
The pillars of heaven tremble
and are astounded at his rebuke.
By his power he stilled the sea;
by his understanding he shattered Rahab.
By his wind the heavens were made fair;
his hand pierced the fleeing serpent.
(Job 26:11-13, emphasis mine)
While poetry always gives space for artistic license, there is often a flow of thought between stanzas. Given what we’ve already talked about concerning Tiamat, it’s hard to miss the fact that Rahab falls right in the middle of a poem about God making the heavens. So rather than consider Rahab as a tangent far from this topic, it makes sense to consider her as an element within Job’s praise of God’s creative power in making the heavens. The pillars of heaven are mentioned in the verse before Rahab and the heavens are mentioned after.12 And these references come after the mention of many other sky-themed words like the north,13 the moon, and three mentions of the clouds.
Could it be that Rahab is the creature that Job sees God stretching out across the north to make the heavens? Is it Yahweh’s wind that captured and killed that fleeing serpent in order that He might make the heavens fair?14
Furthermore, the fact that God shattered Rahab by His understanding is very interesting; for it brings to mind a few words from Jeremiah about God creating the heavens.
“The gods who did not make the heavens and the earth shall perish from the earth and from under the heavens.”15
It is he who made the earth by his power,
who established the world by his wisdom,
and by his understanding stretched out the heavens.
When he utters his voice, there is a tumult of waters in the heavens,
and he makes the mist rise from the ends of the earth.
He makes lightning for the rain,
and he brings forth the wind from his storehouses.
(Jeremiah 10:11-13, emphasis mine)
By God’s understanding He crushed Rahab. By God’s understanding He stretched out the heavens. Again, we see possible cosmogony themes here in which God subdues and stretches out Rahab to create the world. Isaiah 51 continues to further our point by mentioning Rahab being cut up and the creation of the sky within the same chapter.
Awake, awake, put on strength,
O arm of the Lord;
awake, as in days of old,
the generations of long ago.
Was it not you who cut Rahab in pieces,
who pierced the dragon?
Was it not you who dried up the sea,
the waters of the great deep,
who made the depths of the sea a way
for the redeemed to pass over?
And the ransomed of the Lord shall return
and come to Zion with singing;
everlasting joy shall be upon their heads;
they shall obtain gladness and joy,
and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.“I, I am he who comforts you;
who are you that you are afraid of man who dies,
of the son of man who is made like grass,
and have forgotten the Lord, your Maker,
who stretched out the heavens
and laid the foundations of the earth,
and you fear continually all the day
because of the wrath of the oppressor,
when he sets himself to destroy?
(Isaiah 51:9-13, emphasis mine)
And in case that weren’t enough, the themes of Tiamat continue to play out in Psalm 89 as well, which almost seems like a reiteration of sorts of Isaiah 51.
You rule the raging of the sea;
when its waves rise, you still them.
You crushed Rahab like a carcass;
you scattered your enemies with your mighty arm.
The heavens are yours; the earth also is yours;
the world and all that is in it, you have founded them.
The north and the south, you have created them;
Tabor and Hermon joyously praise your name.
You have a mighty arm;
strong is your hand, high your right hand. (Psalm 89:9-13)
After surveying these passages, we can see it makes pretty good sense to see Rahab as a primeval chaoskampf/cosmogony water creature that is an opponent of God. Her destruction leads to God bringing the ordered world into existence.
Like Leviathan, there is really no reason to consider her a real creature, but we must instead recognize her meaning in the story. She is nothing in comparison to God’s mighty arm. She is subjected to God and destroyed by God. The false gods can’t take credit for creation via any linkage to Tiamat’s corpse, for God is the one and only creator. And while He did not actually use Tiamat’s body to create the world, the Hebrews are happy to envision Him doing so in order to promote His authority and to insult and demean the false gods who are also nothing in comparison to God.
Overcoming Rahab is easy for God. “While chaos was a serious threat to the pagan gods, it is no problem at all to the Lord.”16 Yahweh is all-powerful. It is He who made the water in the heavens along with the winds and the storms and everything else. None of the other gods made anything in creation and they will perish once and for all,17 just like Rahab.
She is the same kind of being as Leviathan. In fact, they are so much the same that they will get lumped together quite easily, and that’s perfectly okay. But even in that lumping, she still remains different enough that she conforms better to Tiamat while Leviathan conforms better to Litan. We may not know where the name Rahab came from, but we recognize the elements of her backstory.
But Rahab also has special meaning beyond all that we’ve already learned, which we will see next.
Egypt
In our last chapter we briefly addressed the fact that some have identified Leviathan as a metaphor for the nations that oppressed Israel. While it seemed a bit of a stretch to truly see Leviathan in such a light, Rahab is quite the opposite. After all, Isaiah 30:7 explicitly identifies Rahab as a metaphor for Egypt.
Egypt’s help is worthless and empty;
therefore I have called her
“Rahab who sits still.”
Within context, God is prophesying through Isaiah that Israel shouldn’t expect Egypt to help them get free from exile, because she is Rahab-who-sits-still—“a sarcastic name for this supposedly powerful monster.”18 Though Egypt may be a powerful chaotic beast like Rahab (or perhaps used to be a powerful chaotic beast like Rahab), for one reason or another, she is currently unhelpful. Or as restated in the Greek Bible translation of Jesus’ time, “The Egyptians will benefit you to no avail and ineffectively” (Is 30:7).
Egypt being likened to Rahab makes sense, for Egypt herself is pictured as a chaos creature of sorts. In comparing the two, Heiser says that Egypt
is tarred and feathered, as it were, with the same chaos symbology. These things are not accidental. The writers, whether it’s the writer of Exodus or one of the prophets, wants his readers in those cases to think about Egypt as a chaos force.19
Egypt’s symbolism as the chaotic Rahab is also seen in Isaiah 51, a passage we covered in the last few pages. Let’s revisit it again, but this time notice the parallels between Rahab and Israel crossing Red Sea.
Awake, awake, put on strength,
O arm of the Lord;
awake, as in days of old,
the generations of long ago.
Was it not you who cut Rahab in pieces,
who pierced the dragon?
Was it not you who dried up the sea,
the waters of the great deep,
who made the depths of the sea a way
for the redeemed to pass over? (Isaiah 51:9-10, emphasis mine)
Since Isaiah 30:7 shows us that the prophet already had Egypt in mind as a metaphor for Rahab, we can now easily see the story of Israel crossing the Red Sea here in Isaiah 51. Generations ago God put on strength and defeated Rahab/Egypt and dried up the Red Sea for Israel to cross through its great depths.
But wait—didn’t we see a similar theme in the last chapter when we read Psalm 74 and saw God separate the waters and crush Leviathan while doing so? This passage sounds very similar to that, so why are we okay with seeing the Red Sea in this passage, but primeval waters in the other? The answer is found in the context. Isaiah has already likened Rahab to the Red Sea, so it makes sense for him to go there.
However, since Rahab and Leviathan are often seen as the same creature because of overlapping themes, I am inclined to agree with one scholar that “two facts from primeval ages are viewed here: creation and deliverance from Egypt.”20 Or as another elaborates,
The prophet has associated the creation of heaven and earth out of the oceans of chaos with the deliverance of the people of Israel out of Egypt through the waters of the Reed Sea. The god of Israel is called upon to repeat such an act of salvation on behalf of the people of Judah living in exile by the rivers of Babylon.21
From Rahab to Zion
The final passage where we see Rahab as a personification of Egypt is in Psalm 87:4, where God states that, “Among those who know me I mention Rahab and Babylon; behold, Philistia and Tyre, with Cush.” Rahab stands out like a sore thumb here because a sea monster obviously doesn’t belong on a list of nations. Therefore, it’s obvious that the psalmist is referring to her in an Isaiah-esque kind of way.
Let’s pause here to recognize the beauty of this verse; for it’s here that we find that there are some Yahweh-worshippers outside of Israel’s genetic line that God will still establish in Zion: “the eschatological hope of God’s dwelling with His people.”22
While this truth didn’t fully seem to sink in until the book of Acts, we see here in Psalm 87 that God has always made space for outsiders that follow Him. Yes, believe it or not, there are even some of God’s own people amongst the people identified with the chaos of Rahab. They will find their hope in the end-times, when God establishes them in His holy city. Revelation attests to this picture:
After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!” (Rev 7:9-10)
Let us not forget this. It’s far too easy to get caught up in unimportant details in a study like this and miss the important spiritual messages integrated into it. There are people in the darkest places (like that of Rahab) that will inherit God’s kingdom because they have made their allegiance with God’s kingdom rather than the kingdoms of the false gods. This truth must stick in our hearts, for the fact that God explicitly calls Egypt, “Rahab," and offers them redemption in the same Psalm is a wonder to behold.23
Conclusion
Though we may not know where her name came from, Rahab is easily pictured as another primeval, mythical chaos creature. And while she may sometimes serve as a metaphor for Egypt, that is not her full Biblical purpose—or even her main Biblical purpose.
While she is not a real-life creature, there is the possibility that we could understand Rahab to be “the name of a powerful demonic force thought to be behind that nation [Egypt].”24 After all, mythological sea creatures often seem to take on god-like statuses in their creation myths, so perhaps Isaiah’s jab is not only at Egypt, but at Rahab as an actual deity over Egypt that is spurred on by demonic forces.
However we might view her, while Rahab can be lumped together with Leviathan, she also remains distinct enough to be seen as a separate being that is more closely associated with the cosmogony of Tiamat than the chaoskampf of Yam.
But regardless of what we make of her in the end, the themes we must take away are solid. She is chaos and God is order. She is strong, but her strength is nothing in comparison to God’s power. She loses and God wins.24
Used with Permission from Chapter 2 of Jamin Bradley's book, Kaiju of Biblical Proportions.
Footnotes
1 If our assumption about Job being a Yahweh-worshipping outsider is correct, then the fact that he makes reference to Rahab only furthers the belief that he may have been referring to a myth outside of normal Israelite conversation.
2 While “It is unlikely that we can build any thorough creation cosmogony” based on the destruction of Leviathan in the Baal Cycle (Brueggemann, Dale A. “Baal, Critical Issues.” The Lexham Bible Dictionary), it is not unthinkable. In fact, it is hypothesized by some that the “content of several missing passages in the Ugaritic tablets is related to creation.” (Mangum, “Leviathan,” The Lexham Bible Dictionary).
3 In Assyrian literature, Tiamat is understood as salt water and Apsu as fresh water, but one scholar says that in the Mesopotamian myth, “The significant opposition between Tiāmat and Apsu is thus that of feminine and masculine principles, rather than salt water versus fresh water.” (Alster, B. “Tiamat,” Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible).
4 Dunne, John Anthony. “Enuma Elish,” The Lexham Bible Dictionary.
5 Just as Job saw Leviathan as subservient and powerless in comparison to Yahweh, so he saw Rahab. Her helpers are not even her own, for they bow before Yahweh.
6 Cabal, Ted et al. The Apologetics Study Bible: Real Questions, Straight Answers, Stronger Faith. Nashville, TN: Holman Bible Publishers, 2007, p. 747.
7 Spronk, K. “Rahab.” Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible, p. 685.
8 Alster, B. “Tiamat.” Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible, p. 867.
9 Barry, John D. “Genesis 1:6,” Faithlife Study Bible.
10 Boyd, Gregory A. The Crucifixion of the Warrior God: Volumes 1 & 2. Minneapolis, Fortress Press, 2017, p. 378.
11 “Tehom.” The Lexham Bible Dictionary.
12 Probably best understood as the mountains, which seem to hold up the sky in ancient belief.
13 In my opinion, best understood as the heavens. As one scholar points out, “The north translates the Hebrew Tsapon, which some interpreters equate with the mythological mountain from where the god Baal ruled (Isa 14:13). However, ‘stretching out the heavens’ is a common expression in the Old Testament (Psa 104:2; Isa 40:22; 44:24; 45:12; Jer 10:12; 51:15), and the verb is not used with the earth or mountains.” (Reyburn, A Handbook on the Book of Job, p. 474-475)
14 Job’s references to Tiamat could go beyond references to the sky, because Job 26:5-6 is about the underworld, which was partially made by the other half of Tiamat’s body in the Mesopotamian myth.
15 Intriguingly, this one sentence is written in Aramaic instead of Hebrew. Several reasons have been proposed as to why: (1) an editor later added it in; (2) it was an Aramiac proverb; or (3), it was written in a language the people of the surrounding nations could understand. While all ideas are valid, I favor the third, myself. Such a theory maintains our previous idea that the Hebrews wanted the surrounding nations to hear their jabs at the false gods.
16 Schultz, Carl. “Job.” Evangelical Commentary on the Bible, p. 355.
17 Psalm 82 reiterates this theme. Learn more about the death of the false gods in chapter 20 of my book, The Rush and the Rest.
18 Smith, Gary V. Isaiah 1–39. The New American Commentary. Ed. E. Ray Clendenen. Nashville, B & H Publishing Group, 2007, p. 513.
19 Heiser, Michael S. “Exodus 1, Part 1.” The Naked Bible Podcast. Ep. 255. January 19, 2019. http://www.nakedbiblepodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/NB-255-Transcript.pdf, p. 9.
20 This quote by A. Schoors is cited in: Smith, Gary. Isaiah 40-66. The New American Commentary. Nashville, Broadman & Holman Publishers, 2009, pp.403-404.
21 Spronk, “Rahab.” Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible, p. 685.
22 Shepherd, C.E. “Zion.” The Lexham Bible Dictionary.
23 For more on God redeeming the Egyptians, see Isaiah 19:16-25.
24 Ross, Allen P. “Psalms.” The Bible Knowledge Commentary: An Exposition of the Scriptures. Ed. J. F. Walvoord and R. B. Zuck. Vol. 1. Wheaton, Victor Books, 1985, p. 857.