Behemoth & Leviathan

The Flood

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We still have only the vaguest picture of the box that is going to make sure animal life survives after the Flood, let alone how the different animals are going to be living in it. We did hear God tell Noah to make sure there was food on board for the animals (and his family!) to eat. Abraham ibn Ezra dropped into his comment a mention of “the midrash about an animal so big that it grazes on a thousand mountains,” which he described dismissively as “fun to listen to.”

Today we’re going to spend some quality time with that fantastic animal, the Behemoth — not merely because his story is fun and entertaining, but because he (and his aquatic pal the Leviathan) will bring us right back around to Genesis 1 and the story of creation. Midrash, I remind you, is a kind of rabbinic fan fic, and lots of material that achieved only brief mention in the Bible, or no mention at all, still circulated to provide the rabbis with material.

We quoted the midrash about Behemoth last time from its source in Pirke d’R. Eliezer 11. Though the midrash doesn’t say so, the ultimate source of the “thousand mountains” is a verse in Psalms:

^{Ps 50:10} For Mine is every animal of the forest,

     the beasts [בְּ֝הֵמ֗וֹת b’hemot] on a thousand mountains.

Robert Alter translates the second half of the verse as “the herds on the thousand mountains,” and comments:

This mystifying and evocative phrase has encouraged various emendations, but it may be a proverbial or even mythological reference of which we remain ignorant.

Since אֶלֶף éleph ‘thousand’ is also a word for cattle (see Deuteronomy 28 for three of its six occurrences), the Greek translator assumed that’s what was meant in this verse too. It fits the context a little more snugly, so it may be correct. For us, the question is whether b’hemot is plural (as it sounds) or singular, as it is in Job 40:15. That -ot as a singular ending will take us to Prov 9:1, where Wisdom [singular חָ֭כְמוֹת ḥokmot] builds her house with the famous “seven pillars of wisdom.”

This is the same Wisdom who has just finished saying:

^{Prov 8:22} The LORD created me at the beginning of His course

         As the first of His works of old.

         …

²⁴       There was still no deep [תְּהֹמ֥וֹת t’homot] when I was brought forth,

…

²⁷       I was there when He set the heavens into place;

         When He fixed the horizon upon the deep;

²⁸       When He made the heavens above firm,

         And the fountains of the deep gushed forth;

²⁹       When He assigned the sea its limits,

         So that its waters never transgress His command;

     When He fixed the foundations of the earth. [NJPS]

We read about her way back in Genesis 1, when God thought, Let’s make an earthling. When that singular word with a plural ending (like elohim!) first occurs in Proverbs, Michael Fox says this:

Ḥokmôt may be a Phoenicianism, from *ḥukmōt; thus Albright, deriving it from a hypothetical Canaanite *ḥukmatu … Comparable is the use of bᵉhēmôt as a collective sg. (Jer 12:4; Joel 1:20; Job 12:7; in Ps 73:22 the pl. form is semantically sg. as well).

Behemoth too, in the long description of him in the book of Job, is called “the first of God’s works,” just like Wisdom in Prov 8:22. After 10 verses, he is joined by Leviathan. According to Jewish tradition, they will provide the meat course and the fish course (respectively) for the righteous in the World to Come.

Just as Behemoth seems to be a Phoenician / Canaanite language form, we know Leviathan from the literature of Ugarit, another Canaanite city on the Mediterranean seacoast. Peter Machinist, in the Encyclopedia Judaica, says this about Leviathan:

In the Bible it is used interchangeably with several other sea monsters — tannin (“dragon”), rahav, and yam (“sea”); of which the last-named alternates with neharim (“flood”) in Hab. 3:8) — all of whom are represented as supernatural enemies of God. This hostility directly reflects a myth widely known in pre-biblical sources of a primordial combat between the creator deity and the forces of the sea, personifying chaos, which the former must overcome to create and control the universe.

We saw this as far back as the second verse of the Bible, when we encountered “darkness over Deep [תְה֑וֹם t’hom],” and again in 1:21, when “God created the sea-serpents [הַתַּנִּינִ֖ם ha-tanninim].” Machinist enumerates some of the earlier versions of this story that we now (once again) know from the ancient Near East:

• Hittites: the struggle between the dragon Illuyankas and the mortal Hupashiyas

• Mesopotamia: the battle of Marduk and Tiamat [= t’hom] in the creation epic

• Ugarit: Baal and Anat against various sea monsters, one of which is named Lotan

Lotan (lwtn when transliterated from the Ugaritic cuneiform alphabet into ours) and Leviathan (lwytn if we perform the same trick on the biblical word) are obviously variants of the same name. The story that makes these two gigantic beasts part of the catering service at the eschaton can’t be separated from the (midrashic) role of Behemoth, the 1,000-mountain monster, at the time of the Flood, and that of Leviathan in the ancient Near Eastern theogony we discussed when we read Gen 1:21.

That’s because the end-times are the theological bookend of creation. Sometimes the chaos-monster eats you, and sometimes — at the end of time — you eat the chaos-monster.

The Baal epic calls Lotan “the fleeing [brḥ] serpent … the twisting [ʿqltn] serpent.” We see exactly those characteristics in Isaiah’s description of “The Defeat of the Chaos Dragon”:

Isa 27:1       In that day the LORD will punish,

         With His great, cruel, mighty sword

         Leviathan the Elusive [בָּרִ֔חַ brḥ] Serpent—

         Leviathan the Twisting [עֲקַלָּת֑וֹן ʿqltwn] Serpent;

     He will slay the Dragon [תַּנִּ֖ין tannin] of the sea.

Bringing all this back around to the story of the Flood, as the midrash Ibn Ezra was laughing at does, reminds us of something important about the Flood. It’s no coincidence that the “eschaton” link above takes you to our discussion of Psalm 29, the Canaanite poem about Baal appropriated by a brilliant Israelite poet for YHWH. Remember that Ps 29:10 tell us that “YHWH reigned before the Flood,” using language that can simultaneously be read to say that he “sits enthroned over the flood” (in the NRSV translation).

The Flood = the Deep = the Dragon = the Sea is precisely what — or who — will be taking over the world once more as our story continues. What looks from an earthly perspective like an awful lot of water can be seen through a more cosmic lens as the resurgence of the character that, elsewhere in the Bible, is God’s primordial antagonist. In the Genesis version, God / YHWH is in full control — but it would be a mistake to forget the metaphysical aspect of our story. We’ll go on to the last verse of our chapter next time.