From the Deep - Leviathan in Jewish Tradition - Genesis 1

Arthur Rackam, 'Leviathan'

21] And God created the great taninim, and every living creature that creepeth, wherewith the waters swarmed, after its kind, and every winged fowl after its kind; and God saw that it was good. 

כא  וַיִּבְרָא אֱלֹהִים, אֶת-הַתַּנִּינִם הַגְּדֹלִים; וְאֵת כָּל-נֶפֶשׁ הַחַיָּה הָרֹמֶשֶׂת אֲשֶׁר שָׁרְצוּ הַמַּיִם לְמִינֵהֶם, וְאֵת כָּל-עוֹף כָּנָף לְמִינֵהוּ, וַיַּרְא אֱלֹהִים, כִּי-טוֹב.  


Welcome to the first blogpost of "From the Deep" a series of short thoughts and reflections on Leviathan in Jewish tradition, starting from the Bible and then spreading forward (and even backward) in history.

We begin, as all things do, with Genesis 1, in which God creates the world through speech over the course of 7 days.

Leviathan - the Sea Monster of the Soul

"What are you writing your paper on?"

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.