What Is Leviathan in the Bible? The Sea Beast Only God Can Tame

Leviathan is the great sea monster of the Bible, a creature no human being can catch and only God can master. The Hebrew text names it six times, in Job, the Psalms and Isaiah. In Job 41 it is a living beast and in Psalm 104 a creature at play in the sea, while Psalm 74 and Isaiah make it a picture of the evil God overthrows.

Most of us meet Leviathan in a question. God speaks to Job out of the whirlwind and asks him, “Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down?” (Job 41:1). Job could not, and God draws the lesson himself: “None is so fierce that dare stir him up: who then is able to stand before me?” (Job 41:10). Yet this beast that nobody dares to wake is a creature God made, and a psalm tells us what he made it for: “There go the ships: there is that leviathan, whom thou hast made to play therein” (Psalm 104:26).

Five passages name it, six times in the Hebrew, because Isaiah 27:1 names it twice. The King James Version prints the word only five times, since in Job 3:8 it translates the Hebrew another way.

Passage	What Leviathan is there	In the King James words
Job 3:8	A beast some claim to rouse	“who are ready to raise up their mourning”
Job 41	The sea beast no one can tame	“Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook?”
Psalm 74:14	A many-headed foe God crushed	“Thou brakest the heads of leviathan in pieces”
Psalm 104:26	A creature at play in the sea	“whom thou hast made to play therein”
Isaiah 27:1	A serpent God will punish	“leviathan the piercing serpent”

If you search the King James Version, Job 3:8 is the one you will not find. In his anguish Job curses the day he was born and calls on “them” who “curse the day, who are ready to raise up their mourning.” The Old Testament scholar Charles Pfeiffer pointed out that the King James wording “misses the reference to Leviathan which is obvious in the original,” and the Revised Standard Version brings it out: “who are skilled to rouse up Leviathan.” Job was wishing for something strong enough to swallow the day of his birth.

Isaiah names Leviathan twice in one verse: “In that day the Lord with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish leviathan the piercing serpent, even leviathan that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea” (Isaiah 27:1).

Only Job 41 describes it in full, and the beast it describes is armoured, fiery and proud. “His scales are his pride, shut up together as with a close seal. One is so near to another, that no air can come between them” (Job 41:15–16). “By his neesings a light doth shine, and his eyes are like the eyelids of the morning. Out of his mouth go burning lamps, and sparks of fire leap out. Out of his nostrils goeth smoke, as out of a seething pot or caldron” (Job 41:18–20). Weapons mean nothing to him: “He esteemeth iron as straw, and brass as rotten wood” (Job 41:27). “He maketh the deep to boil like a pot” (Job 41:31). And the chapter ends, “Upon earth there is not his like, who is made without fear. He beholdeth all high things: he is a king over all the children of pride” (Job 41:33–34).

Scripture never says how big it is, and the stories of a monster hundreds of miles long come from later Jewish legend. The Talmud tells of sailors who saw a fish “three hundred miles in length” swimming into the jaws of Leviathan, and of a banquet in the age to come at which the righteous will eat its flesh. Later Jewish commentators, Maimonides among them, mostly took these stories as allegories.

Christians and Jews have answered that in three ways, and serious readers hold each of them.

Many readers have taken Leviathan to be the crocodile. Strong’s concordance defines the Hebrew livyathan as “a wreathed animal, i.e. a serpent (especially the crocodile or some other large sea- monster),” and Pfeiffer thought Job 41 describes “a living creature, probably the crocodile, familiar in the Nile.” Those who read it so usually take Behemoth, the land beast of Job 40, to be the hippopotamus. There is more on that in whether the hippopotamus is in the Bible, and on the crocodile in crocodiles in the Bible.

Some young-earth creationists think it was a sea reptile that has since died out. ChristianAnswers.Net suggests “It could have been a Kronosaurus (pronounced: KRON-oh-SOR-us) or something like it,” and adds, “It seems these animals were still alive at the time of King David.” The clues it points to are the beast’s size, its jaws and its armoured body.

Others read the chapter as poetry, built from a real animal and from older imagery. The Jewish Encyclopedia, writing of Behemoth and Leviathan together, judged that “the Biblical description contains mythical elements” and that “these monsters were not real.” And Pfeiffer, who saw a crocodile in Job 41, also saw that Psalm 74 and Isaiah 27 speak the language of an ancient sea dragon. The three readings are not far apart in what they teach. Whether Job pictured a crocodile, a vanished reptile or a beast of poetry, God’s point to him is the same: Job cannot master it, and God made it.

The Hebrew word comes from a root meaning “coil” or “twist,” and Strong’s calls it “a wreathed animal,” so the picture is of a coiling serpent.

Israel’s neighbours told stories about such a serpent. Tablets found at Ras Shamra, where the ancient city of Ugarit stood, tell how the god Baal fought a sea monster called Lotan, and one of them uses words strikingly close to Isaiah’s: “When thou hast smitten Lotan, the fleeing serpent (and) hast put to an end the tortuous serpent, the mighty one with seven heads.” But in Ugarit it is Baal who fights the serpent, and in Isaiah it is the Lord alone. As Pfeiffer wrote, “Isaiah was, of course, a strict monotheist. He did, however, draw upon the common stock of poetic imagery known to his people.” The prophet took the most frightening monster his neighbours could imagine and showed it falling under the sword of the one true God. The psalm’s “heads of leviathan,” in the plural, may echo the same picture.

The name has lived on outside Scripture, too. In 1651 the philosopher Thomas Hobbes gave it to his book Leviathan, his picture of the sovereign power of the state, “taking that comparison out of the two last verses of the one and fortieth of Job.”

The Bible never says so, but many Christians have read it that way. Isaiah calls Leviathan “that crooked serpent,” and Revelation names the great dragon “that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world” (Revelation 12:9). Revelation’s dragon also has “seven heads and ten horns” (Revelation 12:3), and the beast that rises “up out of the sea” has seven heads as well (Revelation 13:1). The word Leviathan never appears in Revelation, but its sea and its serpent call up the same picture, and Pfeiffer thought the seven-headed beast from the sea “reminiscent of the seven-headed Lotan of the Ras Shamra tablets.”

Gregory the Great, in his long commentary on Job, read Leviathan as the devil, and in God’s question about the hook he found the cross. Leviathan “was caught with a hook,” he wrote, because when the devil seized the bait of Christ’s body through his servants (Gregory’s word is “satellites,” meaning henchmen), “the sharp sting of His Godhead pierced him through.” So what Job could never do, Gregory tells us, God did on Calvary. Jewish interpreters have read Isaiah’s two serpents in more than one way: some cabbalists as Satan and his consort, and commentators such as Kimhi and Abravanel as the powers hostile to the Jewish people. There is more on the names the Bible does give the devil in Lucifer and Satan.

In some charismatic and Pentecostal teaching, the Leviathan spirit is a demonic power of pride that, as Bible Hub sums it up, “twists truth and causes spiritual oppression.” The teaching rests on Job 41:34, where Leviathan is “a king over all the children of pride.” The group guide Free Chapel published for Jentezen Franklin’s sermon “Defeating The King of Pride” goes only as far as this: “it may not be a stretch to say that Leviathan may be another serpent-like manifestation of Satan.” It calls pride “a ruling spirit” that “lurks beneath the surface,” and it names four signs of it: “a diminished or nonexistent prayer life, the tendency to speak harsh words, the breaking of covenants, and a lack of desire to serve others.”

The phrase “spirit of Leviathan” does not appear in Scripture, and Job 41 speaks of a creature God made, not of a spirit. But the warning about pride is the Bible’s own, and in Job even the king over the children of pride has a Maker. The rest of Scripture gives the same warning: “God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace unto the humble” (James 4:6).

A psalm remembers God’s victory over it, the sea divided and the monster broken: “Thou didst divide the sea by thy strength: thou brakest the heads of the dragons in the waters. Thou brakest the heads of leviathan in pieces, and gavest him to be meat to the people inhabiting the wilderness” (Psalm 74:13–14). Isaiah looks forward and promises that “in that day” the Lord “shall punish leviathan the piercing serpent” (Isaiah 27:1). And in John’s vision of the new creation the sea itself is gone: “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea” (Revelation 21:1).

The disciples saw a little of that ending on the water. In a great storm Jesus “rebuked the wind, and said unto the sea, Peace, be still. And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm,” and they asked one another, “What manner of man is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?” (Mark 4:39–41). The deep that Leviathan makes boil like a pot lies quiet at his word. When Job had heard God speak of Leviathan, he answered as we can answer too: “I know that thou canst do every thing, and that no thought can be withholden from thee” (Job 42:2).

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