From the Deep - Playing with Leviathan - Psalm 104

Psalm 104:24-26 

    24] How manifold are your works, O Lord! In wisdom You have made them all; the earth is full of your creatures. 25] So is this great and wide sea, where there are innumerable creeping things, living things, small and great. 26] There go the ships; and Leviathan that You created to play with.

כד מָה־רַבּוּ מַעֲשֶׂיךָ ׀ ה' כֻּלָּם בְּחָכְמָה עָשִׂיתָ מָלְאָה הָאָרֶץ קִנְיָנֶךָ: כה זֶה ׀ הַיָּם גָּדוֹל וּרְחַב יָדָיִם שָׁם רֶמֶשׂ וְאֵין מִסְפָּר חַיּוֹת קְטַנּוֹת עִם־גְּדֹלוֹת: כו שָׁם אֳנִיּוֹת יְהַלֵּכוּן לִוְיָתָן זֶה יָצַרְתָּ לְשַׂחֶק־בּוֹ:

It's been a little while.

My baby daughter is 4 weeks old and doing all the things a 4-week old should do (they mostly involve bodily functions). Meanwhile, with minimum sleep I return to Mythic Writing and my ongoing series 'From the Deep', to delve once more into the mythic layer of the Bible.

Psalm 104 is a praise of the orderliness and greatness of God's creation. It holds a special place in my heart now, not just because of the Leviathan reference, but because we used the first two verses as part of our Simchat Bat ceremony to celebrate the birth of our daughter.

The psalmist praises how God "established the earth on its foundations" (v5), gives drink to every creature (v11) and so on. Psalm 104 is full of the joy of the natural world. In the context of all this splendour, verses 25-26 are another part of the greatness of creation - the marvelous sea with all its creatures, including the Leviathan, created for God to 'play with'.

What does it mean that the sea monster Leviathan, that we have seen as the manifestation of chaos, was created by God to play with?

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.