From Sea Battles to String-Puppets: Leviathan, Creation and Theodicy in the Book of Job

2Yahweh’s answer to Job has been the source of countless debates and critical re-readings over the centuries, and nothing has perplexed scholars as much as the fact that, instead of ending with an accounting for His apparent injustices, Yahweh ends with a lengthy poetic description of the sea monster Leviathan. It seems a “noble irrelevance, ” as George Bernard Shaw famously dismissed it,1 and the reader is both drawn to the passage’s majesty and repelled by its obscurity. In the following pages I will present a new reading of this passage, based on Job’s uses of Rahab and Leviathan and their roots in ancient Canaanite and Mesopotamian texts. It is my contention that these uses in Job represent not just leftover references to earlier tales, but rather deliberate reworkings of the chaoskampf myth into a radical new formulation of the problem of suffering in absolute monotheism. I will first examine the ancient sources of Rahab and Leviathan, highlighting the Biblical parallels. I will then trace ways in which the Biblical uses fail to cohere with the ancient traditions, culminating in a more detailed look at Job’s innovative treatment of the sea monster archetype.2 I. Ancient Near Eastern Sources Before digging down to the ancient texts, it is important to clarify the identity of th