Aww – they’re adorable! Behemoth and Leviathan, watercolor by William Blake from his Illustrations of the Book of Job (1826)

(4) LEVIATHAN & BEHEMOTH

And now it’s time for a series of special mention entries consisting of matched pairs of mythological villains, commencing with the most primeval Biblical beasts of all, the ur-beasts, arguably greater than even the most apocalyptic beasts – Behemoth and Leviathan.

They appear in most detail in the Book of Job, effectively as a matching set. The central plot of the Book of Job essentially has God and Satan playing cosmic poker, using Job and his family as chips. Behemoth and Leviathan appear almost as a tangent, when God is telling off Job for questioning God’s questionable poker game. As usual, God appeals to His own greatness, which He demonstrates by stating that even primal chaos monsters such as Behemoth and Leviathan are basically just His pets.

God expounds on Behemoth in Chapter 40 in the Book of Job as some primal beast of the land – “Look at Behemoth, which I made just as I made you; it eats grass like an ox. Its strength is in its loins and its power is in the muscles of its belly”. Although Behemoth has typically been identified as an extremely large or powerful mythic beast, it has also been associated with more mundane animals – usually a hippopotamus, but also an elephant, rhinoceros or buffalo (while creationists have seen it and Leviathan as dinosaurs).

However, poor Behemoth has been overshadowed by his aquatic and serpentine counterpart, Leviathan, the primal beast of the sea or water. Leviathan’s most distinctive appearance is in the chapter following that for Behemoth, Chapter 41 of the Book of Job, in which God goes fishing. Unlike Behemoth, Leviathan is also mentioned elsewhere in the Bible, typically as a poetic image or reference, and is identified in the Book of Isaiah as a serpent or dragon of the sea. Accordingly, Leviathan has typically been identified as an aquatic beast, following in the Near East mythic traditions of sea serpents or monsters, with the Babylonian Tiamat coming to mind (or the Nordic Midgard Serpent for that matter). Or maybe it was just a crocodile. After all, those things are scary enough…

Both have entered popular parlance but again Leviathan has overshadowed Behemoth – while both have been adapted as words signifying “something overwhelmingly huge, powerful, or monstrous”, leviathan tends to have the more common usage, boosted among other things by its use by Hobbes for the title of his book on political philosophy (essentially signifying the state’s monopoly on violence).

RATING;

A-TIER (TOP TIER)