Leviathan and Behemoth: The Two Monsters of the Book of Enoch
One monster in the depths of the sea, and one in a desolate wilderness. The Book of Enoch tells how they were separated, and later traditions add what will become of them.
In shortAccording to chapter 60 of 1 Enoch, Leviathan and Behemoth are two monsters that were separated on a single day. Leviathan, the female, dwells in the depths of the sea. Behemoth, the male, lives in a desolate wilderness called Dendain, east of the garden where the righteous dwell.
Deep in the sea, above the springs from which the waters flow, lives one monster. Far away from her, in a wilderness with nothing in it, lies a second monster, so large that his chest fills the entire desert. They never meet, and they do nothing. They wait.
This is the picture drawn in chapter 60 of 1 Enoch, and it is strange even by the standards of a book that has giants three hundred cubits tall. The two monsters threaten no one, and no one fights them. They are simply in storage.
On that day two monsters will be separated. The female, whose name is Leviathan, will dwell in the depths of the sea, above the springs of the waters. The male, whose name is Behemoth, fills with his chest the desolate wilderness called Dendain, east of the garden where the chosen and the righteous dwell, in the place where he settled my ancestor, the seventh from Adam; Adam is the first man whom the Lord of Spirits created.
1 Enoch 60:7–8
Two beasts from the Book of Job
The names come from the Book of Job. At the end of the book, when God answers Job out of the whirlwind, he describes two mighty beasts. The first is Behemoth: “Behold now behemoth, which I made with thee,” a creature whose bones are “as strong pieces of brass.” The second is Leviathan, who cannot be drawn out with a hook, and of whom it is said: “Upon earth there is not his like.”
In the Book of Job the two beasts are an argument. Look at what I have made, God says, and tell me whether you are capable of understanding the world. The Book of Enoch takes both of them, and asks a question that Job never asked: where are they now?
A very old sea monster
Leviathan is far older than the Book of Job. The prophet Isaiah calls him “the piercing serpent” and “that crooked serpent,” and a psalm says to God: “Thou brakest the heads of leviathan in pieces.” Heads, in the plural.
In excavations that began in 1929 at Ras Shamra on the Syrian coast, tablets were discovered from the ancient city of Ugarit, more than three thousand years old. One of them tells how the god Baal struck down Lotan, the fleeing serpent, the twisting serpent, the one with seven heads. The resemblance to Isaiah's language is almost word for word. Leviathan, then, is an inheritance: the sea monster of Canaanite myth, whom the young god defeats in order to impose order on the world.
The Bible kept the memory, and changed the relationship. Already in the first chapter of Genesis we read that on the fifth day “God created great whales,” in Hebrew taninim, the great sea monsters. That short sentence settles an ancient argument. In the myth, the sea monsters came before the world, and the god had to defeat them in order to create it. In Genesis they are created on an ordinary working day, between the fish and the birds. The Hebrew version of the Book of Enoch uses exactly the same word, and calls Leviathan and Behemoth “the two taninim.” In Psalm 104 there is no longer any war: “There is that leviathan, whom thou hast made to play therein.” The monster that threatened the world has become one of God's creatures, almost a pet.
What the Book of Enoch adds
The Book of Enoch adds three things to the story.
The first is the pairing. Here Leviathan and Behemoth are female and male, two halves of one thing. Together they cover the whole world, sea and land.
The second is the separation. The book stresses that the two were separated “on one day,” one placed in the depths of the sea and the other on dry land. 4 Ezra, a Jewish work from the end of the first century CE, explains why: both were created on the fifth day, and the waters could not hold them both. Behemoth was given part of the dry land, and Leviathan stayed in the sea.
The third is the address. Behemoth lives in a wilderness called Dendain, east of the garden of the righteous. The name is known from no other source, and every attempt to identify it has remained a guess. It is also worth noticing who is speaking. The speaker mentions “my ancestor, the seventh from Adam,” that is, Enoch, which means the speaker is Noah. Many scholars see this chapter as a remnant of an older work about Noah that was woven into the Book of Enoch.
The narrator asks to see the might of the two monsters, and is answered almost with a rebuke: you, son of man, want to know what is hidden.
Monsters waiting for a banquet
What are they waiting for? The Book of Enoch offers only a hint. The angel of peace says that the two were created to show the greatness of God, and that they are being fattened for the day of judgment. What will be done with them on that day, the verse does not say.
Other sources speak openly. According to 2 Baruch, when the Messiah comes Behemoth will be revealed from his place, Leviathan will rise from the sea, and both will be food for all who are left. The Talmud, in tractate Bava Batra, elaborates: God created Leviathan male and female, realized that if they multiplied they would destroy the world, and so killed the female and preserved her flesh in salt for the righteous in the age to come. A banquet will be made from Leviathan's flesh, and a tabernacle from his skin.
The tradition stayed alive. The hymn Akdamut, written in the eleventh century and recited on the festival of Shavuot in Ashkenazi communities, describes the battle that will take place between Leviathan and the wild ox before the banquet, and the righteous sitting around the table.
Three stages in the life of a monster
Set these sources side by side and a process appears. In the first stage the monster is fought: the god strikes the sea serpent and crushes its heads. In the second stage it is stored: each monster is assigned a place, one in the deep and one in the desert, both under supervision. In the third stage it is eaten.
This is, roughly, how human beings deal with their great fears. At first the fear is an enemy to be defeated. Then it becomes part of the order of things, something that has a place and can be lived with. And in the end, if you wait long enough, it becomes a delicacy.
In the seventeenth century the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes gave the two monsters a new job. Leviathan, published in 1651, is the title of his book about the sovereign state, the overwhelming power that keeps people from destroying one another. It is still considered one of the foundations of political thought. Behemoth is the title of his book about the English Civil War. Hobbes, too, understood that the two come as a pair.
In modern Hebrew the story ended more quietly. Leviathan is simply the word for a whale: a large, gentle sea mammal that people sail far out to glimpse for a moment. The seven-headed monster of chaos has ended its career as a tourist attraction. That, too, is a way to defeat a monster.
