Leviathan, with Behemoth and Ziz: the Primordial Beasts of the Bible
Leviathan of the sea, Behemoth of the land and Ziz of the sky: from Ugaritic roots to the Psalms, from Job to the Talmud and on to Hobbes's Leviathan.
In the Hebrew Bible Leviathan is the sea monster par excellence, an immense creature that only God can tame. Beside it later Jewish tradition placed two other primordial beasts: Behemoth, lord of the dry land, and Ziz, the gigantic bird of the sky. Together they represent the power of creation in the three realms of sea, land and air, and their fate is linked, according to ancient texts, to the end of time.
The Canaanite Roots
The Hebrew name Liwyatan has a forerunner in the texts of Ugarit, the ancient city on the Syrian coast excavated from 1929 onwards, whose archives in alphabetic cuneiform script have yielded mythological poems. In the cycle of the god Baal appears Lotan, a sea serpent described as the fleeing serpent and the twisting serpent, associated with a seven-headed monster. The same language is found almost word for word in a passage of the prophet Isaiah.
Isaiah, in chapter 27, announces that on that day the Lord will punish Leviathan, the gliding and twisting serpent, and will slay the dragon that is in the sea. Psalm 74 recalls that God crushed the heads of Leviathan, while Psalm 104, in a very different tone, presents it as a creature playing in the sea, formed by God himself. The monster of chaos thus becomes part of the created order.
Leviathan in the Book of Job
The fullest description is found in the Book of Job, when God answers the man's questions out of the whirlwind. First he presents Behemoth, a land animal that eats grass like an ox and has boundless strength in its loins; then Leviathan, which no fisherman can catch with a hook. Torches and sparks of fire come from its mouth, smoke from its nostrils, and its hide is armour that no weapon can pierce.
The meaning of the speech is clear: if man cannot master these creatures, still less can he claim to judge their Creator. Many modern commentators have seen in Behemoth the hippopotamus and in Leviathan the crocodile, magnified by poetry. In medieval Christian tradition, instead, Leviathan became an image of the devil, and the gaping jaws of hell were often painted as the mouth of an enormous sea monster.
Ziz and the Banquet of the Righteous
Ziz is the least known of the three beasts. Its name appears in Psalms 50 and 80, in the expression ziz sadai, usually translated as “what moves in the fields”. Rabbinic tradition made it a colossal bird: the Babylonian Talmud, in the tractate Bava Batra, tells of a bird seen with its feet in the water and its head in the sky, and later tradition identified it with Ziz.
The same tractate relates that God created Leviathan male and female, but killed the female so that their offspring would not destroy the world, and that its flesh will be served to the righteous at a banquet at the end of time. The Book of Enoch, in the section known as the Parables, datable to around the beginning of the Christian era, already distinguished Leviathan, a female monster of the sea, from Behemoth, a male monster of the desert.
In 1651 the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes titled his treatise on the State Leviathan, depicting on its frontispiece a gigantic sovereign made up of countless human bodies. The biblical monster thus came to signify a political power without rival on earth. From Ugarit to Hobbes, Leviathan has continued to represent a boundless force, which may be chaos or order, but which always exceeds the measure of man.