Article

Four ways of Creation

Authors: Jo Milgrom and Yoel Duman

Introduction

Where did things come from? How did things get started? Who made them? These are aetiological questions that fascinate humans of all cultures, times and ages. Most cultures have myths of origins—of themselves, their environment, their practices and institutions, of their world. One of the most widely-known stories of origins is the biblical account, found in the opening chapters of Genesis. The popular understanding of this account reads Creation as the serene work of a solitary and omnipotent God, who created the world out of nothingness by willing into existence all its components through the spoken word:

“And God SAID, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.”

However, a close examination of Genesis 1 hints at alternate conceptions of Creation. For example, while light is created, neither water nor earth nor wind are created, but rather they are organized, limited, shaped.
This artistic process becomes explicit in Genesis 2:

Then the LORD God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being. Out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the sky Genesis 2:7, 19 (NASB)

In other biblical texts, sculpture becomes architecture, as God measures and builds.
Genesis 1 also contains veiled references to mythical opponents of God, known from other accounts of Creation, both within and outside the Bible.
Such struggles with monsters, the third method of creation, are sometimes shocking:

In that day the LORD will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent, With His fierce and great and mighty sword, Even Leviathan the twisted serpent; And He will kill the dragon who lives in the sea Isaiah 27:1 (NASB)

Such overt references to Chaos monsters are also found in ancient Near Eastern mythology and help to explain strange allusions in Genesis 1, which we will discuss below.
Finally, a fourth mode of Creation emerges, as birth water issues from the womb of the Sea, as in God’s speech out of the whirlwind in Job 38:

4 Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell Me, if you have understanding, 5 Who set its measurements? Since you know. Or who stretched the line on it? 6 On what were its bases sunk? Or who laid its cornerstone, 7 When the morning stars sang together And all the sons of God shouted for joy? 8 Or who enclosed the sea with doors When, bursting forth, it went out from the womb; 9 When I made a cloud its garment And thick darkness its swaddling band 10 And I placed boundaries on it And set a bolt and doors, 11 And I said, ‘Thus far you shall come, but no farther; And here shall your proud waves stop’?

Verses 4 – 7 describe the creation as an act of divine architecture (similar to Genesis 2), while verses 8 and 9 describe it in terms of the birth process. In addition, words associated with struggle and battle (‘boundaries,’ ‘bars’ and ‘doors,’ etc) are used in verses 7 and 10-11, while this mythological adversary is stopped by divine speech in verse 11 (as in Genesis 1). Thus four different means of creation can be found in this powerful account; these same four means occur repeatedly throughout the Bible.
How have artists dealt with the different accounts of Creation? And how can we personalize these different conceptions?

Creation through speech/magic/language: Genesis 1 -2

In the beginning….

1:3 God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light…
1:6 Then God said, “Let there be an expanse in the midst
of the waters
1:9 Then God said, “Let the waters below the heavens be gathered
1:11 Then God said, “Let the earth sprout vegetation
1:14 Then God said, “Let there be lights
1:20 Then God said, “Let the waters teem
1:24 Then God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures
2:3 Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it

How does one visualize creation through the spoken word? Who in our world speaks and causes things to come into existence? In order to answer these questions, let’s look at the art.

In Anton Koberger’s illumination of his 1478 Bible, a fully anthropomorphic God appears at the top of the perimeter gesturing and speaking the world into existence (in the center, he builds Eve from Adam’s body, by art, to be discussed below). In order to portray concretely the act of speaking, Koberger drew a bundle of lines emanating from God’s mouth, directed into the heart of Creation.

Koberger Bible: God Creates Eve by Fiat
Koberger Bible: God Creates Eve by Fiat

In Meister Bertram’s Grabow altarpiece of a century earlier, gesture suffices to indicate speech.

These gestures symbolize words. They look like magic; the magician, speaking Aramaic, says “Abracadabra” (‘I create through speech’, אברא כדברא) and lo and behold with a wave of the hand, no-thing becomes some-thing. Language creates reality. This view of Creation re-sounds through history, from the Hebrew Bible, to the New Testament (the logos, “In the beginning was the Word”), to healing through talk therapy, to post-modernist literary theory.

Cupola of the Creation: "And God blessed the seventh day"
Cupola of the Creation: "And God blessed the seventh day"

A particularly important use of speech in Creation is blessing, appearing three times in Genesis 1 – 2, which concludes with the blessing of the work of Creation:

Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made.

A hyper-anthropomorphic illustration of these words is found in the Cathedral of San Marco in Venice: Thus, in these renditions, God speaks in two ways: 1) breathe emerging from God’s mouth and 2) gestures visualizing the speech of Creation.
But, once spoken and heard the word is gone. To give it extended life in time, the word must be seen. Vision engages memory, so the word can endure. Words are encoded using pictures evolving into letters. Writing becomes another way of visualizing spoken language. Of course, the ultimate Writing, according to Jewish tradition, is the Torah. The very first Midrash in Bereshit Rabba creates a dialogue between the figure of Divine Wisdom in Proverbs 8 and the first word of Genesis 1, בראשית (Not to be read In the Beginning, but Using Torah/Wisdom). The Midrash works as follows: In Proverbs, Wisdom claims that she was God’s instrument in Creation:

But, once spoken and heard the word is gone. To give it extended life in time, the word must be seen. Vision engages memory, so the word can endure. Words are encoded using pictures evolving into letters. Writing becomes another way of visualizing spoken language. Of course, the ultimate Writing, according to Jewish tradition, is the Torah. The very first Midrash in Bereshit Rabba creates a dialogue between the figure of Divine Wisdom in Proverbs 8 and the first word of Genesis 1, בראשית (Not to be read In the Beginning, but Using Torah/Wisdom). The Midrash works as follows: In Proverbs, Wisdom claims that she was God’s instrument in Creation:

22 The Lord made me, the Beginning (ראשית) of His way, the first of His works of old. 30 Then I was beside Him, as a craftsman; And I was daily His delight, rejoicing always before Him Proverbs 8: 27 -30 (NASB)

The Midrash explains:

Then I was beside him, as  אומן= a craftsman.  The Torah says, “I was the instrument of the Holy One. In the way of the world, when a king of flesh and blood builds a palace, he does not build it on his own, but consults with a craftsman; nor does the craftsman build on his own, but has plans and sketches, where to put the rooms and windows.  Similarly the Holy One looks in the Torah and creates the world. This is why the Torah says: בראשית ברא אלהים (= Using reshit God created…) and reshit means Torah, as it is said “The Lord made me, the reshit of His way” (Proverbs 8:22). Bereshit Rabba 1:1

The writing of Torah engenders the art of calligraphy. “Beautiful writing” is not just a coding system, but an expression of aesthetics and theology.  For example, in Ben Shahn’s Alphabet of Creation, black letters cluster in the divine womb, potential but not yet actual. The artist created this lithograph as part of his treatment of the Sefer Yetsira, an ancient mystical Jewish text.
The womb itself is a vast white space, given form by the unarticulated letters. Theologically the white background is the presence of God, so bright we can see nothing until the scribe pens the black letters. God needs us, the scribes, in order to reveal a limited aspect of God’s presence.
A passage from the Jerusalem Talmud describes the written Torah as black fire on white fire:

Pinchas said in the name of R. Simeon ben Lakish: The Torah that the Holy One, blessed be He, gave Moses was white fire inscribed with black fire. It is fire: mixed with fire, quarried from fire, emanating from fire. Talmud Yerushalmi Shekalim 25b           

Thus the black letters (black fire) give shape to the blinding light of God’s presence, the white fire.

Gert Jacobson presents Creation by an unseen God, through use of light and Hebrew letters in the shape of a flame. Earlier Abel Pann had further abstracted, leaving only the ray of light.

Even earlier, rather than a stream of light, Kabbalists drew Creation as a constellation of lights (the sephirot), the fundamental link between the spiritual world of God and the material world.

Portae Lucis (p. 5): a kabbalist meditating on the three of the ten Sephiroth
Portae Lucis (p. 5): a kabbalist meditating on the three of the ten Sephiroth
Pardes Rimmonim (page 71): Aleph
Pardes Rimmonim (page 71): Aleph

This constellation has the vague shape of a human body, often referred to as Adam Kadmon (the Primeval Man), but also identified as the characteristics of God. The sephirot can also take the shape of the letter Aleph, again integrating human shapes.
Kabbala unlocks the written Torah, which both contains the key to and is the process of Creation.  The white space between letters, the absence of vowels and punctuation and the numerical values of the Hebrew letters create an ambiguity which explodes into phantasmagorical mystical creation.
Long before literature, long before the alphabet, long before language, there was the image. Aboriginal art from Australia is mainly concerned with Dream Time, the local version of the Creation story, which is past, present and future, Creation, Death and Rebirth.

Tjakamarra Old Mick, Old man Dreaming on Death or Destiny

Creation as Art and architecture

As outlined above, a second means of Creation appears in Genesis 2 and other biblical texts: Art. One of the most evocative examples of this concept is found in the words of the anonymous prophet of the Exile and Return:

Who has measured the waters in the hollow of His hand, And marked off the heavens by the span, And calculated the dust of the earth by the measure, And weighed the mountains in a balance And the hills in a pair of scales? Isaiah 40:12 (NASB)

Medieval artists fascinated by the image of God the builder, repeatedly placed architects’ tools in the hands of the Creator.

Tiberius Psalter (Cotton Tiberius C. VI
Tiberius Psalter (Cotton Tiberius C. VI
St. Louis Bible : God as Architect of the Universe
St. Louis Bible : God as Architect of the Universe
The Ancient of Days
The Ancient of Days

Blake William

In the 11th century Tiberius Psalter, Genesis 1 is fused with Isaiah 40 into a schematic presentation of the Beginning. God is measuring the world’s weight, volume and length using scales, a compass and other tools, while a dove (“the spirit of God”) hovers above the waters. In the mid-13th century St. Louis Bible, God the Creator “encompasses” the world, positioned as God’s womb.  Within the world are darkness, formlessness, primeval waters and the four cardinal directions (Genesis 1:2), reflected in the page’s corners, a microcosm within the macrocosm. The compass turns up again in the 19th century in the work of the romantic British artist/poet William Blake. An anthropomorphic Creator (Blake’s Urizen, an emanation from the “true” God) emerges from the fiery Divine, directing the compass over the void and setting limits to the world.
Despite all the advances in science and our probing into space, we still think in terms of a three-tiered world, hard wired into our psyche:  heaven, earth and the underworld. Our feet are on the earth, we look toward the heavens and speculate about what is beneath us. The diagram here maps out biblical references to this tripartite universe. The world is conceived here as a dwelling, with a roof to keep out the rain, a living area and foundations to support it. The Bible furnishes each of the three domains with components.

Or as poetically summarized in Ginzburg’s Legends of the Jews:

“The earth rests on pillars,
which rest on water,
which rests on mountains,
which rest on the winds,
which rest on storms,
which rest on God’s arm.”
Vol. 5, p. 12, note 28

This conception of the world as a dwelling created by God as architect underlies the opening to God’s speech from out of the whirlwind in Job 38:4-6:

Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell Me, if you have understanding,
Who set its measurements? Since you know.
Or who stretched the line on it?
On what were its bases sunk?
Or who laid its cornerstone…?

Creation of Adam
Creation of Adam

The great modern French sculptor, Auguste Rodin, became fascinated by the image of God the artist and late in his career, sculpted from marble several versions of God’s hand creating humanity. Rodin separates himself both from the tradition of Genesis 1 in which God creates an androgynous being by His word and from the account of Genesis 2 in which man and woman are formed separately, man from the earth and women from the man.  Here, the hand of God holds, as if in the womb, two intertwined figures. This is the work of a sculptor, reflecting on his life’s work as creator in the image of God the Creator.

Four hundred years earlier, Michelangelo another creator out of the Earth, left behind an unfinished figure who seems to be in the process of emerging or awakening out of the stone – Michelangelo the artist imitates God the artist, who “rested from the work that he had yet to create” (Genesis 2:3).

Awakening Giant
Awakening Giant

During work on Michelangelo’s monumental painting of God creating Man, a photographer caught the silhouette of a restorer poised in imitatio dei, the imitation of God the Creator. The Hand of God or serendipity.

Creation of Adam
Creation of Adam

Creation by struggle

Until the discovery of Babylonian epic literature in the 19th century, the account of Creation in Genesis 1 seemed to describe the effortless activity of an omnipotent God on inanimate and passive elements.  The deciphering of the Enuma Elish, the Babylonian creation myth, has revealed a variety of linguistic and literary connections with Genesis 1, and has clarified that the Bible’s bucolic account is really a polemic against the gross and violent conception of creation current in the great cultural center of Mesopotamia.
One of those seemingly passive elements of creation, the Hebrew tehom (“the deep”, Genesis 1:2), turns out to be a cognate of the Babylonian Tiamat, the serpentine monster of the deep and primeval mother, who is vanquished by the god Marduk and sliced up to form the world. For the gory details, click here.

The two illustrations below show how popular the Enuma Elish was in the ancient Near East.  On a silver goblet discovered in the Palestinian village of Ein Samiyah, the two-headed Marduk confronts the snakelike Tiamat with poison plants; representing the next stage in the battle, he straddles her head, here represented as a rosette.  To the right, two figures hold the arc of the sky, separating Tiamat’s two halves and preventing chaos from returning.
This epic battle between Marduk and Tiamat appears frequently as an emblem in ancient Mesopotamia, as in the cylinder seal below, showing the hero-god and his minions combating the chaos dragon.

Marduk defeating Tiamat
Marduk defeating Tiamat
Ein Samiya goblet: Marduk and Tiamat
Ein Samiya goblet: Marduk and Tiamat

Tiamat is also associated with a cohort of monsters, named variously Tanin (cf. Genesis 1:21), Rahab (Isaiah 51:9) and Leviathan (Isaiah 27:1) or Lotan in the Ugaritic epics, as well as in other cultures of the ancient Near East. Tiamat has enjoyed a renaissance in modern times, used in the fantasy game Dungeons and Dragons and appearing frequently in pop culture. In the work of California artist, Judith Jones, her belly is ripped open to reveal the world:

Note that it is the woman’s body giving birth to the world. Thus procreation and struggle are combined in this image.
This violent account was suppressed in the Bible, in order to stress the God of Israel’s effortless omnipotence and exclusivity. Yet, the monster turns up repeatedly, not only in hints within Genesis 1, but explicitly and furiously in Job 41, Isaiah 27 and Psalms 104.                             

La Sainte Bible: The Destruction of Leviathan
La Sainte Bible: The Destruction of Leviathan

Dore Gustave

The Book of Job: Behemoth and Leviathan
The Book of Job: Behemoth and Leviathan

Blake William

Nineteenth century artists William Blake and Gustave Dore each feature God alternately glorifying and subduing the sea serpent, Leviathan.
Nature photographer Ernst Haas captures the raw power of the sea and its effect on the coast, which may have originally produced myths of sea monsters.  In order to create such a powerful image, Haas manipulated his photograph to produce a mirror image of the sea at the Gullfoss Falls, Iceland. The artist writes: “A sandwich photograph: a duplicate transparency placed in reverse over the original one, to produce the effect of divided waters” (Genesis 1:6; Creation, 1965)                          

Thus far we have examined Creation by means of struggle in the Scripture and in the Ancient Near East. In our own day, Beth Ames Swartz also struggles/combats/destroys materials to create. In her Ten Sites Series, she revisited Israel to recreate Jewish women’s stories associated with the sephirot and meqomot. In the process, she developed a technique of creation via destruction.

Israel Revisited: Safed #1
Israel Revisited: Safed #1

One day I took a large piece of water color paper, scratched “fear of dying” on it, ripped an opening in it with a screwdriver.  I wanted to get into it just like I had gotten into the mountains. I scratched in potent words, mutilated the surface of the paper and did the burning…I realized that somehow I was creating a ritual.
Finally I was able to deal with the texture of the rocks.  Developing the fire process/ritual in 1976-77 allowed me to literally get into the work – mutilating and burning the paper, layering it, throwing paint on it and using the earth as pigment – getting into the work as I had gotten into the landscape.
Israel Revisited, Beth Ames Swartz, May 1981, pp. 10 -11

Thus, through a struggle using fire, earth, sunlight and mixed media, Swartz assembles her materials into a collage sculpture in which the Hebrew letter Aleph is revealed in the negative space.

Creation by procreation/love

Sexual intercourse and birth are chief metaphors for creation in many ancient cultures, for natural reasons, but they are suppressed in the Bible, because Israel’s God is beyond Nature and life processes. As a result, upstart biblical religion resisted the blatant sexual imagery of the surrounding cultures, especially Egypt and Mesopotamia.
But the power of these metaphors surfaces despite the tendency to suppress. Thus, in Genesis 1: 24-25, the creation of the land animals is described as:

Histoire admirable des plantes: Portrait of the 'Barometz' or 'Scythian Lamb'
Histoire admirable des plantes: Portrait of the 'Barometz' or 'Scythian Lamb'

Let the earth bring forth, each living creature after its kind – cattle, and creeping things and beasts of the earth, after their kind

It is as if the earth itself was giving birth to these creatures, in the same way that vegetation is described in v. 12: The earth brought forth vegetation…. In the picture below of a legendary beast (which is both animal and vegetable!) we see the Tartary lamb attached to a vertical umbilical cord emerging from Mother Earth.
In addition, in Genesis 1:1-2, the five elements existing before the creation of light (unformedness, darkness, deep, breath and water) universally precede the process of birth; the word בראשית (from ראש = head) itself suggests the crowning of the head at birth.  Likewise, in Job 38 the Sea springs out of the womb. In post-biblical times, these images blossomed in Jewish mysticism, commentary and liturgy, as in the proclamation of Rosh Hashana as היום הרת עולם – popularly translated “today is the birth day of the world”, but more profoundly parsed as “time is forever birthing”. Finally, returning to Genesis, we hear the refrain אלה תולדות (“these are the generations”, literally “these are the birthings”) – the first use of which regards Creation itself (Genesis 2:4).

Nut and Geb
Nut and Geb
Jacob Bryant
Jacob Bryant

Bryant, Jacob

In many ancient cultures, the world is conceived as originally an egg-shaped unity. In the Orphic mysteries, Creation is a coiling serpent, symbolizing the inevitability of time. It cracks this unity into the duality of heaven and earth: God…separated the water above the firmament from the water below the firmament (Genesis 1: 7).  Similarly, in the Egyptian painting above on the right, the feminine heavens (Nut) were once united with the fertilizing Father Earth (Geb), reflecting the same universal image as in the biblical statement: Therefore man shall cling to his wife and they will become one flesh (Genesis 2:24).
What does this cosmic egg look like on the inside?  What is its meaning?

Phanes
Phanes
Scivias: The Universe
Scivias: The Universe

Hildegard von Bingen

These two mandala images, from two entirely different cultural settings, present the inside story of the Cosmic egg. On the left, the Orphic god, Phanes (Light Bringer) appears within the egg, wrapped in the coils of the fertilizing serpent. The frame of the Zodiac, the half shell of the heavens, defines Time, while the four winds define Space.  On the right, the same egg shape characterizes the Cosmos of Hildegard of Bingen, a twelfth century Christian mystic.  Her imagery is based on the seven spheres of Aristotelian cosmology, morphed into ovals, and the Book of Revelation. Here too, time and space are present, in the faces of the four cardinal directions and in the sun, moon and stars. Both of these elliptical images can also be seen as openings into the conceiving and birthing womb.
Some of the same images appear in this European adaptation of Aboriginal art, an expression of the collective unconscious, in which the earth serpent (male) and the oval heavenly seed (female) unite in Creation.

The Serpanterre and the Birth of Water
The Serpanterre and the Birth of Water

D'Etiolles Laetitia

American Body Series (Be fruitful and multiply)
American Body Series (Be fruitful and multiply)

Lang Cay

So, is it Mother Earth or Father Earth? in a photograph of Ernst Haas, smooth flowing contours of newly fallen snow over stones in a shallow river bed bear an astonishing resemblance to our parents, Mother and Father Earth. Future parents embrace the fruit of their seed, echoing God’s blessing of Man and Woman: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the Earth” (Genesis 1:28)
In vitro baby Louise Brown, debuted in Time magazine on July 31, 1978. Here, in the womb of her mother Lesley, she bears an awe-inspiring likeness to the primeval being “Adam Kadmon”, planted in the womb of the eternal “Ein Sof” three hundred years earlier.

Time Magazine (July 31st 1978): Test Tube Baby
Time Magazine (July 31st 1978): Test Tube Baby
Spinozism in Judaism (page 103f.): Adam Kadmon in the womb of the Ein Sof
Spinozism in Judaism (page 103f.): Adam Kadmon in the womb of the Ein Sof

There’s no escaping the procreative archetype in Creation, from the Beginning to Now.

Enuma Elish Tablets 4 – 5

In his lips he held a spell; A plant to put out poison was grasped in his hand…

Marduk, that cleverest of gods, and Tiamat grappled alone in single fight.

The lord [Marduk] shot his net to entangle Tiamat… He shot an arrow which pierced her belly, Split her down the middle and slit her heart, vanquished her and extinguished her life.

Now that the Lord had conquered Tiamat he ended her life, he flung her down and straddled the carcass … The lord rested; he gazed at the huge body, pondering how to use it, what to create from the dead carcass. He split it apart like a shellfish; with the upper half he constructed the arc of sky, he pulled down the bar and set watchmen on the waters, so they should never escape

…With his own hands from the steaming mist he [Marduk] spread the clouds. He pressed hard down the head of water, heaping mountains over it, opening springs to flow: Euphrates and Tigris rose from her eyes…He piled huge mountains on her… and high overhead he arched her tail, locked into the wheel of heaven…Now the earth had foundations and the sky its mantle.

From Ancient Near Eastern Texts, trans. N.K. Sandars

Revelation 12 3 Then another sign appeared in heaven: and behold, a great red dragon having seven heads and ten horns, and on his heads were seven diadems. 4 And his tail swept away a third of the stars of heaven and threw them to the earth. And the dragon stood before the woman who was about to give birth, so that when she gave birth he might devour her child.

Revelation 17 3 And he carried me away in the Spirit into a wilderness; and I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast, full of blasphemous names, having seven heads and ten horns

Ginzburg, Legends of the Jews, Vol. 5, p. 12, note 28

The earth rests on pillars, which rest on water, which rests on mountains, which rest on the winds, which rest on storms, which rest on God’s arm.

Talmud Yerushalmi Shekalim 25b

R. Pinchas said in the name of R. Simeon ben Lakish: The Torah that the Holy

One, blessed be He, gave Moses was white fire inscribed with black fire. It is fire: mixed with fire, quarried from fire, emanating from fire, as it is written (Deuteronomy 33:2), The Lord came from Sinai, And dawned on them from Seir; He shone forth from Mount Paran, And He came from the midst of ten thousand holy ones; At His right hand there was flashing lightning for them.

BR 1:1 (Soncino translation)

I. R. Oshaya commenced [his exposition thus]: Then I was by Him, as a nursling (amon); and I was daily all delight (Prov. VIII, 30)…3 Another interpretation: ‘amon’ is a workman (uman). The Torah declares: ‘I was the working tool of the Holy One, blessed be He.’ In human practice, when a mortal king builds a palace, he builds it not with his own skill but with the skill of an architect. The architect moreover does not build it out of his head, but employs plans and diagrams to know how to arrange the chambers and the wicket doors. Thus God consulted the Torah and created the world, while the Torah declares, IN THE BEGINNING GOD CREATED (I, I),

BEGINNING referring to the Torah, as in the verse, The Lord made me as the beginning of His way (Prov. VIII, 22).4

1 The speaker is the Torah (Wisdom) personified, referring to the preCreation era. The Torah was with God as with a tutor, reared, as it were, by the Ahnighty (this is similar to E.V.); it was also covered up and hidden. This may mean that the laws of the Torah were unknown until the Revelation at Sinai, while some of them remained • hidden’ even then, i.e. their reasons are not known. • E.V .• brought up’. The Midrash understands it to mean that Mordecai concealed her from the public gaze.

3 Translation of the second half of the verse.

• Here too the speaker is the Torah. Thus the verse is translated: By means of the • beginning’, sc. the Torah. God created, etc.

Job 41

1 “Can you draw out Leviathan with a fishhook? Or press down his tongue with a cord? 2 “Can you put a rope in his nose Or pierce his jaw with a hook? 3 “Will he make many supplications to you, Or will he speak to you soft words? 4 “Will he make a covenant with you? Will you take him for a servant forever? 5 “Will you play with him as with a bird, Or will you bind him for your maidens? 6 “Will the traders bargain over him? Will they divide him among the merchants? 7 “Can you fill his skin with harpoons,

Or his head with fishing spears? 8 “Lay your hand on him; Remember the battle; you will not do it again! 9 “Behold, your expectation is false; Will you be laid low even at the sight of him? 10 “No one is so fierce that he dares to arouse him; Who then is he that can stand before Me? 11 “Who has given to Me that I should repay him? Whatever is under the whole heaven is Mine. 12 “I will not keep silence concerning his limbs, Or his mighty strength, or his orderly frame. 13 “Who can strip off his outer armor? Who can come within his double mail? 14 “Who can open the doors of his face? Around his teeth there is terror. 15 “His strong scales are his pride, Shut up as with a tight seal. 16 “One is so near to another That no air can come between them. 17 “They are joined one to another; They clasp each other and cannot be separated. 18 “His sneezes flash forth light, And his eyes are like the eyelids of the morning. 19 “Out of his mouth go burning torches; Sparks of fire leap forth. 20 “Out of his nostrils smoke goes forth As from a boiling pot and burning rushes. 21 “His breath kindles coals, And a flame goes forth from his mouth. 22 “In his neck lodges strength, And dismay leaps before him. 23 “The folds of his flesh are joined together, Firm on him and immovable. 24 “His heart is as hard as a stone, Even as hard as a lower millstone. 25 “When he raises himself up, the mighty fear; Because of the crashing they are bewildered. 26 “The sword that reaches him cannot avail, Nor the spear, the dart or the javelin. 27 “He regards iron as straw, Bronze as rotten wood. 28 “The arrow cannot make him flee; Slingstones are turned into stubble for him. 29 “Clubs are regarded as stubble; He laughs at the rattling of the javelin. 30 “His underparts are like sharp potsherds; He spreads out like a threshing sledge on the mire. 31 “He makes the depths boil like a pot; He makes the sea like a jar of ointment. 32 “Behind him he makes a wake to shine;

One would think the deep to be gray-haired. 33 “Nothing on earth is like him, One made without fear. 34 “He looks on everything that is high; He is king over all the sons of pride.”

Isaiah 27:1

In that day the LORD will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent, With His fierce and great and mighty sword, Even Leviathan the twisted serpent; And He will kill the dragon who lives in the sea.

Psalms 104:24 – 26

24 O LORD, how many are Your works! In wisdom You have made them all; The earth is full of Your possessions. 25 There is the sea, great and broad, In which are swarms without number, Animals both small and great. 26 There the ships move along, And Leviathan, which You have formed to sport in it.