Leviathan

Leviathan is the great creature of the deep, described at length in Job as utterly beyond human control: armoured with impenetrable scales, breathing what looks like fire and smoke, fearing nothing, “king over all the children of pride.” It may draw on the crocodile and the whale, magnified into the very emblem of untameable power.

In the ancient imagination the sea was the realm of chaos, and Leviathan its monster. Yet the Bible insists this terror is merely a creature: God “madest the heads of leviathan in pieces,” and the psalmist notes it plays in a sea God formed, where Leviathan is something God made “to play therein.”

Isaiah looks ahead to the day when the LORD will “punish leviathan… and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea” — chaos and evil finally subdued. Leviathan stands for everything too big and too frightening for us to handle, and for the comforting truth that none of it is too big for God.