It doesn't really matter which class we're talking about, but whenever anyone asks me this question they can usually predict the answer before I open my mouth.
"Sea monsters," I say, and the other person nods their head. "Obviously," they respond, because I always write about sea monsters.
Whether it's a Bible class (Job 40-1), Talmud (Baba Batra 73a-75a) or Zohar (Zohar II: 34a-b), when given a free range of topics, my first thought is to find the sea monsters and write about them.
Luckily for me, despite what you may think about the presence of such creatures in modern, normative Judaism, they lurk all over our tradition, in some places hiding beneath the surface of the waves, in others rearing their many heads over the waters.
As you may have guessed, I have a lot to say about sea monsters, Biblical, pre-Biblical and post-Biblical, but today I want to take a leaf out of the book 'Religion and its Monsters' by Timothy Beal (which I recommend as an interesting easy read, though I disagree with many points he makes) and compare Psalm 74 to Psalm 104, for two accounts of the Biblical sea monsters that are drastically opposed to each other. And from these texts, to learn about balance in a person's mind and soul.
Psalm 104:24-26
O Lord, how manifold are your works! In wisdom you have made them all; the earth is full of your creatures. So is this great and wide sea, where there are innumerable creeping things, living things, both small and great. There go the ships; and Leviathan which you have made to sport with.
Psalm 104, in these verses at least, sees the world in perfect balance and harmony, made through God's divine wisdom. All creatures are part of this harmony, including the Leviathan, here described as that which God made to play with. The fearsome Leviathan, that I described in Radiance, is described as God's pet, and plaything.
Psalm 74 however presents a rather different image:
Psalm 74:11-16
Why do you withdraw your hand, your right hand? Take it out of your bosom! For God is my King of old, working salvation in the midst of the earth. You parted the sea by your strength; you broke the heads of the monsters in the waters. You crushed the heads of Leviathan, and gave him for food to the people inhabiting the wilderness. You cleaved open springs and brooks; you dried up ever flowing streams.
The psalmist here imagines a very different world, a world of strife and conflict, a world in which God, in ancient times, waged war against the many heads of Leviathan, smashed them and divided the creature's flesh. This is no tame pet, there is no harmony, only primeval war.
So which is it?
Is the Leviathan God's pet, fearsome perhaps, but ultimately part of nature's balance? Or does it represent a force against God, a many headed monster that had to be destroyed?
The Bible as Library
The answer, which may seem like a cop-out, is that the Leviathan is both.
The tanach, the Hebrew Bible, is not a monolithic entity with a single thought on almost any topic, rather it is a library, in conversation with itself, debating every question of ultimate significance, giving us poles to navigate our lives.
But this answer is no cheat but a hint to the deep reality of the Biblical sea monster.
Leviathan with its many heads, its roaring waters that threaten to overrun the world in floods, represents chaos. If creation in Genesis 1 is bringing order to a disordered universe, the Leviathan represents the antithesis of this work, the danger of the chaotic forces that threaten to tear apart God's order.
And yet there can be no creation without chaos - the sea monster is the power of the flood, but the flood also fertilises, allows the possibility of growth. The Primordial Chaos may seem to be opposed to God's order, but the deeper truth is that it's all part of nature, the balance of the universe.
Turbulent Souls
We too, as messy human beings, part of God's created world, embody both forces of chaos and order. We experience the deep turbulence of the soul, powerful undercurrents in the great and wide sea of our minds, that threaten to destroy everything ordered in our lives. Depression, rage, hatred - all different heads of the Leviathan in our hearts.
But the deeper truth is that God created everything, and everything has a purpose, some spark of divinity to be redeemed if only we could see it the right way.
The Talmud, in Brachot 5a, teaches that a prisoner cannot free themselves from prison, and perhaps we cannot defeat our monsters alone. But mythology is important because it teaches that monsters can be defeated, God can 'slay Leviathan the twisted serpent, Leviathan the coiling serpent' (Isaiah 27:1).
May we all come to find the harmony and balance of psalm 104, our souls in harmony between creation and destruction, chaos and order, so that our Leviathans can be transformed from sources of disorder to wells of creative energy.
Fascinating! What's your opinion on the view that, in some contexts at least, Leviathan is just the crocodile?
ReplyDeleteI think Robert Alter (in the book I quoted on my blog last week) makes the valid point that to the ancients there was no hard-and-fast distinction between wild animals and mythological animals: generally speaking, they couldn't see either of them and relied on legends and travelers' tales for information about them.
Thanks Daniel! It may be that the line between mythological and natural animals was unclear to ancient peoples, but nevertheless I feel that the Leviathan (aka Tanin, Yam, Tehom, Nehar) is a distinctly monstrous character, portrayed as cosmically powerful, beyond the natural world.
DeleteSee how Leviathan is the crowning 'glory' of Job for example, the high point of God's speech from the whirlwind (Job 40-1). After describing natural phenomena, God moves on to the monstrous Behemoth and Leviathan. Leviathan is described as impossible to capture, as breathing fire - this isn't a description of a crocodile, which we can imagine wouldn't have been so foreign in the land of Israel, with Egypt not far away.
More ambiguous cases are in prophecies against Egypt, for example Ezekiel 29, where the prophet calls pharaoh the 'tanin' in the water. Is this naturalistic, and pharaoh is being called a crocodile of the river nile? Or mythological, and he is being identified with the primordial sea monster?
Why not both?
From other places in Tanach, I think tanin is always hinting at the primordial sea creature, but the image of the crocodile seems to be hinted at by some of these passages.
In short then, I think Leviathan can't be read as a crocodile at all. The name only comes up in more mythological senses. Other sea monster words are more ambiguous, but I think the mythology is always there, lurking beneath the still waters.