Gary Pollard
When we read the book of Job or study it in class, we spend a lot of time on the first couple of chapters, briefly summarize what Job’s friends said, skip over Elihu for the most part (except maybe to decry the “arrogance of youth”), and dig deep again by chapter 38. That’s fair! Most of those chapters read like discussions we may have had with our siblings when we were little: “Yeah huh,” “Nuh uh,” “Yeah huh,” “Nuh uh,” for dozens of chapters.1 It can be tedious, and Job’s bitterness (from soul-crushing trauma) doesn’t do much for one’s weekend disposition. Still, to read everything Job accused God of either doing or allowing (which in our legal system is practically the same thing), and to still be ultimately considered righteous is encouraging. Most of us have probably struggled at some point with the coexistence of a loving God and senseless suffering. “Bone cancer in children” is not unique to mid-2000s atheism. The tedious chapters between the angel-adversary-God section and the leviathan-behemoth-where-were-you-when section are well worth our study.
That said, what was leviathan? I could (and maybe should?) end this article with, “We don’t know for sure.” But this is a series on celestial things in scripture, so I get to speculate. There is some evidence (as presented by the meticulous research of others, whose primary sources I’ve checked with skepticism and found to be plausible) points to ancient cultures all over the world using people (e.g. Gilgamesh, Nergal, Indra, Hercules, etc. for Mars) to represent celestial bodies and events.2 They also used animals like dragons, cows, bulls, serpents, etc. for the same purpose — sometimes for the same celestial body or event.
I don’t doubt for a second that some kind of aquatic dinosaur was probably the earthly counterpart to whatever leviathan was. I do doubt that people in Job’s day had submarines and sonar and other remote sensing technologies, so it may be safe to say that leviathan’s earthly counterpart is extinct. True, we understand so little about our oceans — but we have to be at least somewhat ahead of the (probably) global catastrophe survivors who lived in Job’s day. Apparently these creatures spent time in bodies of water near human civilization and were instantly recognizable.
Looking at ancient near eastern literature as a whole, it seems the inspiration for leviathan could have been celestial. This appears to have been true of the dragon, too, which plays a prominent role in almost every culture’s mythology.
To cut a very long story short (and oversimplify it in the process), the heavens were often visualized by ancient cultures as being a cosmic sea. At some point, from this sea came a dragon/serpent/sea monster that brought great destruction. Lotan (Canaanite) was the “twisting serpent” (c.f. Is 27.1; Ps 74.14) defeated by Baal3 and Anat4. Kur (Sumer) was the serpent who guarded the cosmic waters and was defeated by Ninurta or Enki. Similar themes appear in Egypt (Sekhmet/Amen-Ra), India (Kali/Shiva & Vritra/Indra), Mesoamerica (Cipactli/Quetzalcoatl/Tezcatlipoca), China (Gongong/Yinglong), and Native American folklore (like Uktena of the Cherokee, Mishipeshu/Animikiig of the Great Lakes, Unktehi/Wakinyan of the Lakota, and many others). All are described with language very similar to leviathan in Job, but especially with Rahab in Isaiah 27 and Psalm 74.
As fun as it is to speculate and pattern match, the fact is that there’s still uncertainty. Even if the word leviathan is cognate with lotan or abyss with tiamat, this does not necessarily prove that the two are perfectly interchangeable. Before God gave his name as YHWH to Moses in Exodus 3, he was known most often by some form of El. El was the chief Canaanite deity, possibly the planet Saturn. Unlike the Canaanite-speaking Israelites, however, El of Canaan was married to Asherah and was the father of Baal, Yam, Mot, and Anat. Does that remotely resemble Elohim of the Old Testament? God’s defeat of the twisting serpent could also be a taunt against neighboring religions, not a conflation of God with the Canaanite El.
So while leviathan shares some fascinating parallels with serpent or dragon-like creatures in global mythology — with a compelling case made for their identity as celestial bodies or phenomena — we simply do not know enough to identify this incredible creature with certainty. Leviathan existed to showcase God’s power: it was a created thing, but far too powerful for humanity to tame. God, being far more powerful than humanity, is the only one able to defeat the twisting serpent.
1 Do they still argue like this today? Am I officially old?
2 Cochrane, E. (1997). Martian metamorphosis. Aeon Press. See also Cardona, D. (2006). God star. Trafford. and Talbot, D. (1980). The Saturn myth. Doubleday. These are great resources if you wish to be ostracized by every branch of mainstream scholarly discipline. If you choose to read these, I suggest two things: 1. Check their work against the ancient sources they cite, and 2. Discard just about everything they say about God. Their value is in providing a comprehensive survey of global mythologies from a different perspective (that doesn’t blame everything on aliens), and offering a theory with remarkable internal consistency that brings clarity to many obscure symbols in ancient myth. Of the many different views I’ve studied to make sense of the distant past, theirs is the most reasonable and consistent. Again, once the bones are picked out.
3 Baal Hadad has been identified with the planets Mars, Venus, and Saturn. The strongest evidence seems to lean in favor of either Mars (attributes) or Saturn (linguistics).
4 Anath was described as a star in one of the Ras Shamra tablets. Anahid of the Persians is explicitly named as the planet Venus (Bundahish 5.1, “…the planet Venus [Anahid] unto Sahaves…”).
