Behemoth and Leviathan Will Feed the Righteous at the End

Before the World Was Ordered

Before the land was dry and the sea had its borders, God made two monsters. Behemoth ruled the land. Leviathan ruled the sea. The Book of Job describes them both in language that refuses to be tame: Behemoth, whose strength is in his loins, whose power surges in the muscles of his belly, who drinks up a river without haste; and Leviathan, before whom the mighty are afraid, who makes the depths boil like a pot, who leaves behind him a shining wake (Job 40-41).

In the beginning, God had made a male and female of both. Then, looking at what he had made, he made a calculation. If these two creatures reproduced, the world could not contain them. The female Leviathan was slain, and her flesh preserved in salt for a future occasion. The male lived on alone, waiting in the depths of the sea. Behemoth, the male alone, grazed in the mountains of a thousand hills and drank from rivers that took their source from Jordan.

Why They Were Kept

The Jewish Encyclopedia of 1906, summarizing the rabbinic tradition, recorded the tradition plainly: the flesh of both monsters was reserved for the righteous at the coming of the Messiah. Rabbi Yudan bar Rabbi Shimon, in the midrashic collection of homiletical teachings preserved in texts such as Vayikra Rabbah, developed this into a full scene. At the end of days, Behemoth and Leviathan would fight each other. Behemoth would gore Leviathan with his horns; Leviathan would tear at Behemoth with his fins. Each would deal the death blow to the other. Their flesh would become the central provision of the great banquet that awaited the righteous.

The image is vivid and deliberately excessive. The two most powerful creatures in the world, locked in mutual destruction, providing the feast table for the people who had survived history. There is a logic in it: the creatures too large for the world to contain during ordinary time would become, at the end of ordinary time, exactly the right size for one final meal.

The Problem of Kosher Law

The rabbis, being rabbis, did not let the feast proceed without raising a question. How would the meat of Leviathan be permissible? The laws of shechita, the ritual slaughter required for kosher meat, specified that an animal must be killed by cutting its throat with a sharp blade in a precise manner. Leviathan was not an animal that anyone could slaughter by conventional means. Its scales alone were described in Job as so tight that no air could pass between them, shields fused together, impenetrable.

The resolution some traditions offered was that the slaughter itself would be carried out by the Almighty, and that the action of the creatures destroying each other would count as sufficient. Others argued that at the end of days, with the full messianic redemption in effect, the categories that governed ordinary time would operate differently. The question itself was significant: the tradition took the feast seriously enough to apply halakhic logic to it, treating the final eschatological banquet as subject to the same rules as an ordinary Shabbat meal.

What the Monsters Represented Before They Were Food

Scholar Heinrich Gunkel, writing in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, proposed that Leviathan and Behemoth corresponded to primeval cosmic forces. He pointed to Babylonian parallels: Tiamat the sea dragon, Kingu her consort. The argument was that the Hebrew monsters carried the memory of a creation narrative in which the world was ordered by defeating chaos rather than simply by divine fiat.

The rabbis were not interested in Babylonian parallels. They were interested in the monsters as creatures God had made and controlled. Leviathan was not a force God defeated in the beginning; it was a creature God created, paired, separated, and preserved for a specific purpose. God had not conquered chaos. God had been planning the final feast since before the first Sabbath, and the two largest creatures in existence had been waiting their entire lives to be the main course.

The Tent Made of Leviathan's Skin

The tradition elaborated the feast in other directions as well. The skin of Leviathan would be used to make a great tent over the banquet, providing shade for the righteous gathering underneath. What could not shelter a normal-sized world would be exactly the right size to shade the righteous at the end of time. The scales, each one a shield, would become the walls and ceiling of the space where the people of Israel would finally eat their inheritance.

The verse the tradition anchored to was Psalm 74:14: You crushed the heads of Leviathan; You gave him as food to the people inhabiting the wilderness. The present giving had been a foreshadowing of the final giving. The monsters created before the world was fully ordered had a destination. Everything in creation, the tradition insisted, had been made for a purpose, and even the creatures too large to be in the world during normal time had a purpose that would be revealed at the end of it.