Leviathan: The Formula That Crossed A Border

The tablet is a real object with an inventory number and a display case. The Louvre catalogues it as AO 16641 plus AO 16642, excavation numbers RS 2.[022] plus RS 3.[565]: terracotta, 15 cm high, 15.5 cm wide and 3.1 cm thick, inscribed in alphabetic cuneiform, its text type recorded by the museum as 'mythe (cycle de Ba'al)'. The museum dates it to Bronze recent II, which it defines as 1400 to 1200 BCE, and gives its findspot as the Ras Shamra acropolis, House of the High Priest. It is on display in the Sully wing, room 301, case 12.

The passage on that tablet, KTU 1.5 I 1-3, is spoken by Mot, the god of death, addressing Baal. In one standard English translation it runs: 'When you struck Litan, the fleeing serpent, finished off the twisting serpent, the tyrant with seven heads.' The three descriptive terms in the Ugaritic are btn brh, the fleeing serpent, btn 'qltn, the twisting serpent, and slyt d sb't rasm, the tyrant with seven heads. Translations differ on small things, so no single English rendering is the text: 'struck' appears elsewhere as 'smote', and 'tyrant' as 'potentate' or 'powerful one'.

Isaiah 27:1 reads, in the 2023 Revised JPS translation: 'In that day God will punish with a great, cruel, mighty sword Leviathan the Elusive Serpent, Leviathan the Twisting Serpent; The Dragon of the sea will be slain.' The two epithets in the Hebrew are nahash bariah and nahash 'aqallaton. The creature killed in the sea is a tannin, the ordinary Hebrew word for a dragon or large serpent. Older English versions render bariah as 'fleeing' rather than 'Elusive', which is a translator's choice and not a textual dispute.

Now the correspondence, precisely. The two epithets match directly: Ugaritic brh and Hebrew bariah, Ugaritic 'qltn and Hebrew 'aqallaton. The nouns do not. Ugaritic btn corresponds to Hebrew peten, a word for a viper or a cobra, while Isaiah uses nahash, the general word for serpent. Isaiah is using the same inherited formula with a different noun, which is exactly what reworking an inherited phrase looks like. Aren M. Wilson-Wright and John Huehnergard, writing in Vetus Testamentum in 2021, treat the formula in KTU 1.5 i 1-3 and in Isaiah 27:1 as a single Northwest Semitic poetic formula.

There is a further honesty owed about the name itself. Ugaritic was written without vowels, so the monster's name survives as three consonants, ltn, and how to pronounce it has been argued in print for decades. J. A. Emerton devoted an article in Vetus Testamentum in 1982 to exactly that question, under the title 'Leviathan and ltn: the Vocalization of the Ugaritic Word for the Dragon'. Wilson-Wright and Huehnergard in 2021 propose reading it litan, and derive it and Hebrew liwyatan alike from a common ancestor. The familiar spelling 'Lotan' is an older scholarly convention rather than something written on the tablet. Nobody has ever heard either name spoken.

The Ugaritic texts were unknown to everyone until the twentieth century. They were excavated at Ras Shamra on the Syrian coast in campaigns led by Claude Schaeffer beginning in 1929, and the Commons file page for the museum's own tablet photograph reproduces the excavation field credit 'Fouilles C. Schaeffer 1930-1931'. So every argument here about where Leviathan's language came from is one nobody could have made before about 1930, because the comparison material was under a mound.

The Ugaritic material is also messier than the summaries suggest. Both research files behind this article say the seven headed serpent was defeated by Baal. In KTU 1.5 I 1-3 the god of death does credit Baal, addressing him with 'when you struck Litan'. But in a separate passage, KTU 1.3 III, the goddess Anat lists her own victories and claims to have crushed the twisting serpent with seven heads herself, alongside Yamm and River. Both claims stand in the surviving text, and this file does not adjudicate between them: the cycle is a compilation rather than one seamless narrative.

One popular detail has to be demoted rather than repeated. Both research files state that Litan was a servant, ally or weapon of Yamm, the sea god. No surviving Ugaritic passage says so. What the texts give is a list of defeated water enemies, Yamm, River, the dragon and the twisting serpent with seven heads, standing together in the same boasts. Their association is an inference from proximity in those lists. It is a reasonable inference, and it is still an inference, and exactly the sort of decorative detail that hardens into fact in a summary box.

Then Psalm 104:26, which puts Leviathan in a completely different register. In the 2023 Revised JPS translation it reads: 'There go the ships, and Leviathan that You formed to sport with.' The Hebrew phrase is lesaheq bo, which can mean either that God formed Leviathan to play with, or that Leviathan was formed to frolic in the sea. Either way this Leviathan is not an enemy. It is one item in a hymn cataloguing the ordinary furniture of a well made world, listed between the shipping lanes and the animals God feeds.

The famous Leviathan speech is not in the same place in every Bible. In the Hebrew Masoretic text it begins at Job 40:25 and runs to 41:26. In English Bibles descended from the Vulgate tradition it begins at Job 41:1 and runs to 41:34, which is where the familiar count of thirty four verses comes from. The Latin Vulgate numbers it differently again. The opening line is the same in all of them: 'Can you draw out Leviathan by a fishhook? Can you press down its tongue by a rope?' (Job 40:25 in the Hebrew, 41:1 in English, Revised JPS 2023).

Job 41 in the English numbering is the longest single description of any creature in the Hebrew Bible. In the NRSV rendering carried by the research file: it cannot be caught with a fishhook (41:1); its back is 'made of shields in rows, shut up closely as with a seal' (41:15); 'out of its mouth go flaming torches; sparks of fire leap out. Out of its nostrils comes smoke' (41:19-20); 'the sword that reaches it does not avail, nor does the spear, the dart, or the javelin' (41:26); and 'on earth it has no equal, a creature without fear' (41:33). The chapter opens with a series of rhetorical questions and then simply describes the animal.

The point of that chapter inside the book of Job is not zoological. The Leviathan speech is the climax of God's answer out of the whirlwind, and its argument is that Job cannot master this creature and God can, so Job is in no position to put God on trial. The creature's function in the poem is to be unmasterable. A creature that could be identified, netted and written up in a field guide would not do the job the poem needs it to do.

Leviathan is one term in a small family of Hebrew chaos vocabulary, and the family is more informative than the individual. Rahab is a separate sea monster, at Job 26:12, Isaiah 51:9 and Psalm 89:10 in the English numbering. Tannin is the general word for dragon or sea serpent, at Isaiah 27:1, Isaiah 51:9 and, applied to Pharaoh, at Ezekiel 29:3 and 32:2. Tehom is 'the deep', at Genesis 1:2 and Psalm 104:6. Yam is simply 'sea', personified at Psalm 74:13 and Habakkuk 3:8. Behemoth is the land counterpart, described at Job 40:15-24, immediately before the Leviathan speech.

One correction inside that vocabulary, because the popular version is the wrong way round. Hebrew tehom and Akkadian Tiamat are related words, but tehom is not a borrowing from the Babylonian goddess's name and is not a demythologised version of her. Both descend from a common Semitic root for the primordial ocean, and the standard philological objection is that a direct borrowing would not have produced the form tehom. David Tsumura's 2005 book is a sustained argument that the biblical texts using this vocabulary are describing storms and floods rather than replaying a primordial combat. This file did not read that book: it is cited for the position it is known for holding.

The chaos combat reading of Psalm 74, Isaiah 27 and Job 41 is the majority position in critical scholarship, and it is not universal. Two book length dissents were published in the same year: David Tsumura's 'Creation and Destruction: A Reappraisal of the Chaoskampf Theory in the Old Testament' (Eisenbrauns, 2005) and Rebecca Watson's 'Chaos Uncreated: A Reassessment of the Theme of Chaos in the Hebrew Bible' (de Gruyter, BZAW 341, 2005). Both argue that the framework has been read into texts that are using different imagery. The mainstream case is not thin either: John Day's 'God's Conflict with the Dragon and the Sea' (1985) and Carola Kloos's 'Yhwh's Combat with the Sea' (1986) are its standard monographs. So the honest word is dominant, and the dissent has names.

Two further questions here are genuinely open and should be carried unresolved. First, whether the correspondence between the Ugaritic and the Hebrew demonstrates direct literary borrowing at all, or a shared inherited poetic tradition that both drew on independently. Second, whether the Leviathan material in Job 40 to 41 is early, belonging to the original poem, or a later editorial addition to it. Neither is settled, and this file's own research documents concede the first while asserting the opposite a few pages earlier.

Medieval Jewish manuscripts illustrate the banquet rather than the combat. The North French Hebrew Miscellany, British Library Add MS 11639, made in northern France between roughly 1278 and 1298, shows Leviathan as a large scaled and finned fish, according to the description carried with the digitised image. The Ambrosian Bible, made in Ulm in 1238 and now Biblioteca Ambrosiana B 32 inf, folio 136r, shows Leviathan, Behemoth and the bird Ziz together, in the miniature associated with the messianic feast of the righteous. Both identifications come from descriptions attached to the digitised reproductions rather than the libraries' own catalogues.

Revelation 12:3 describes 'a great red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns', and Revelation 13:1 'a beast rising out of the sea, with ten horns and seven heads'. That these figures stand in some relation to the older Near Eastern chaos dragon tradition is standard in critical commentary. What the relation MEANS is contested: whether the Revelation dragon is still functioning as a primordial chaos monster, or has been repurposed entirely as a political symbol for Rome, is unresolved in New Testament scholarship. Gunkel's 1895 book, whose full title names Genesis 1 and Revelation 12 as its two subjects, is where the modern argument that they are connected begins.

In later Christian tradition Leviathan was progressively identified with the devil, and the sea monster became the mouth of hell. Medieval manuscript art shows the result. In the twelfth century Liber Floridus the Antichrist is drawn seated on Leviathan. In the Hortus Deliciarum tradition God fishes for Leviathan with a line baited by the cross, an image that survives only in copies, because the manuscript itself burned in 1870.

The afterlife of the pair has its own scholarly literature. Mark Sneed's 'Taming the Beast: A Reception History of Behemoth and Leviathan' (de Gruyter, 2021) traces how they were interpreted across Christianity, Judaism and Islam. K. William Whitney's 'Two Strange Beasts' (Harvard Semitic Monographs 63, 2006) makes a more surprising argument, and it is his argument rather than an established finding: that post-biblical and rabbinic traditions preserve ancient material not all present in the biblical texts themselves, which would mean a stream of tradition running alongside the canonical texts rather than out of them.

Thomas Hobbes published 'Leviathan, or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill' in 1651, using the biblical sea monster as his figure for the sovereign state: the only power great enough to hold down the war of all against all. The choice was not decorative. The engraved title page, by Abraham Bosse, carries a Latin motto across the top: 'Non est potestas Super Terram quae Comparetur ei', 'There is no power on earth to be compared to him'. That is Job 41:24 in the Vulgate numbering, the same verse that reads 'on earth it has no equal' at Job 41:33 in English Bibles. The text is cited here from the revised student edition edited by Richard Tuck (Cambridge University Press, 1996).

Debra Scoggins Ballentine's 2015 study 'The Conflict Myth and the Biblical Tradition' (Oxford University Press) argues that the combat myth, in which a divine warrior defeats the sea or the sea dragon and thereby secures his throne, was adapted across more than two thousand years to validate particular ideologies and political arrangements. On that reading, the interesting question about Leviathan is not what it was, but what claiming to have beaten it was FOR. This file did not read the book; it is cited for the thesis its publisher states.

Before the identifications, a caution about pictures. Gustave Dore engraved 'The Destruction of Leviathan' in 1865 as part of his illustrated Bible, showing a vast coiled sea serpent being struck down from the clouds. It is an illustration of Isaiah 27:1, and it is the image most people picture when they hear the word Leviathan. It is also a Victorian artist's reading of a Hebrew verse, made roughly sixty years before anyone alive had read the Ugaritic tablet. It is evidence about the nineteenth century and nothing earlier.

The same caution covers the other famous image. William Blake engraved 'Behemoth and Leviathan' in 1825 to 1826 as plate 15 of his Illustrations of the Book of Job, showing God indicating the two creatures to Job; the Metropolitan Museum of Art's impression carries that title on the museum's own record. Blake illustrates the pairing, both animals at once, which is what the poem does. Neither engraving shows what an ancient writer imagined.

The oldest naturalistic reading identifies the Job 41 Leviathan with the Nile crocodile, on the strength of the armoured back, the impenetrable hide and the terror it inspires. It is not merely a pre-critical guess. The palaeontologist Robert T. Bakker presented an abstract to the Geological Society of America in 2018 titled 'Paleontological Myths in Ugaritic and Old Testament Stories: Leviathan is the Nile Crocodile, Behemoth is a Young Adult African Elephant'. That is a conference meeting abstract rather than a peer reviewed paper and should be weighed as one, though it is a real citable item by an eminent palaeontologist. Mark Sneed's 2021 reception history observes that modern biblical scholars have converted these two originally cosmic monsters into a crocodile and a hippopotamus.

A popular alternative identifies Leviathan with a whale, chiefly on the strength of size and of Psalm 104:26 putting it in the open sea alongside ships. It fits worse than the crocodile: it accounts for nothing in Job 41's armour, fire or weaponry, and it has no place in the combat tradition at all. Most readers meet it through modern Hebrew, where livyatan means whale, a clean illustration of this article's method: a word can end up naming an animal without that having been its original referent.

The reading of Leviathan as a surviving dinosaur, plesiosaur or mosasaur, advanced in young earth creationist literature, has no evidential support. It requires humans and non avian dinosaurs to have overlapped, which the fossil and radiometric record excludes. And it requires a poem whose whole rhetorical purpose is that the creature cannot be captured or described to be read as a field description of one. This is not a live scholarly debate with two sides: no peer reviewed biblical or palaeontological literature holds it.

There is likewise no basis for reading Leviathan as a craft, a machine, an extraterrestrial, or a garbled memory of one. Every element usually pressed into that reading, the smoke from the nostrils, the fire from the mouth, the impenetrable armour, the boiling sea, belongs to a poetic vocabulary documented four centuries earlier at Ugarit describing a seven headed serpent, and to a genre whose purpose is to describe something no human can master. The imagery is already fully formed in an older text, on an object on public display. A tradition whose earlier form is a clay tablet in the Louvre does not need an unknown origin.

Which leaves the question itself, and this is the refusal that matters. 'What real animal was Leviathan' misreads the genre. A chaos monster in a Ugaritic combat poem, a psalm of complaint, a wisdom poem and an apocalyptic oracle is a theological and political figure. It was not offered as a report, and the texts give it different properties depending on what each needs it to do: an enemy crushed at creation in Psalm 74, a creature formed to play in Psalm 104, an unmasterable animal in Job 41, an enemy still to be killed in Isaiah 27. Four incompatible characters in one book is not what the record of an animal looks like.

And then the gap, which is the honest end of the subject. Nobody has ever found a manuscript link between Ugarit and the writers of the Hebrew Bible. The Ugaritic tablets date to roughly 1400 to 1200 BCE and the city was destroyed around 1185 BCE. The biblical passages using the formula are later, in some cases centuries later, and Isaiah 24 to 27 in particular is conventionally dated well after the eighth century prophet whose name the book carries, though its date is disputed. So the connection is argued from shared vocabulary, shared poetic formulae and shared imagery, not from a chain of copies. This article's own research file concedes it: the correspondence 'is not universally accepted as demonstrating direct literary borrowing'.