Behemoth and Leviathan Will Fight at the End of Days

Before the world was fully formed, God made two monsters.

One ruled the land. The other ruled the sea. And from the beginning, the plan for both of them was the same: they would be held in reserve, like a gift kept in a locked room, until the very end of days — when the righteous would finally collect what they had been owed all along.

This is one of the most vivid and theologically dense images in all of rabbinic literature. It is also one of the most contested — because the rabbis, being rabbis, immediately asked: when these two cosmic monsters tear each other apart, will the meat be kosher?

What the Book of Job Saw

The Torah introduces both creatures in the Book of Job, chapters 40 and 41. Behemoth is described as "the first of the ways of God" (Job 40:19) — the primordial land animal, so massive it drinks a river without noticing, so powerful that no human weapon can touch it. The Leviathan is its counterpart in the sea: the unconquerable king of water creatures, whose breath sets coals ablaze, whose scales are shields locked together, who makes the deep boil like a pot (Job 41:14-23).

The 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia entry on Leviathan and Behemoth — itself drawing on centuries of midrashic accumulation — notes that God originally created both a male and female Leviathan, then slew the female. The reason given is startlingly practical: two such creatures reproducing would destroy the world. The female's flesh was salted and preserved in a cosmic larder, reserved for the righteous at the time of the Messiah. The male was left alive, circling the deep, waiting.

The Talmud offers a measurement to help the imagination grasp the Leviathan's size: a fish that enters its jaws measures three hundred miles in length. When the Leviathan is hungry, the heat of its breath makes all the waters of the deep boil. Its eyes possess great illuminating power — yet the creature fears a tiny worm called kilbit, which kills large fish. Even the unconquerable has its weakness, the rabbis noted. Nothing in creation is without a check.

The Battle That Will End the World's Waiting

Vayikra Rabbah 13:3, compiled c. 5th–6th century CE, preserves the teaching of Rabbi Yudan ben Rabbi Shimon: in the World to Come, the Behemoth and the Leviathan will engage in an epic battle before the assembled righteous. The land monster and the sea monster will destroy each other. The Behemoth will stab the Leviathan with its horns and tear it open. The Leviathan will smash the Behemoth with its fins and deliver a fatal blow. Both creatures — which no human weapon could touch — will destroy each other, and their flesh will become the great banquet.

The midrash frames this as a reward for spiritual discipline. Those who abstained from the brutal Roman animal fights — the spectacles of cruelty that were a defining feature of imperial public life — will be privileged to witness this ultimate combat. There is a deliberate inversion here. The Roman arena was violence for entertainment, with human suffering and animal death as spectacle for the powerful. The messianic battle is something altogether different: a cosmic resolution of primordial tensions, witnessed by those who refused to participate in lesser violence. The righteous earn their front-row seat precisely by having looked away from the Roman stage.

Is Any of This Kosher?

Here is where the midrash does something that could only come from a tradition that takes law as seriously as it takes legend. The Sages asked the obvious question: how can these creatures become food for the righteous if the manner of their death — mutual combat, not ritual slaughter — is not shechita, the prescribed method of kosher slaughter?

The Mishna Hullin 1:2 is explicit: you cannot slaughter with a serrated blade, a saw, animal teeth, or fingernails, because those methods cause undue suffering by tearing rather than cutting cleanly. The Leviathan's fins and the Behemoth's horns are certainly not approved slaughtering implements. Under ordinary law, the meat would be forbidden.

Rabbi Avin bar Kahana provides an answer that is stunning in its scope: the verse in Isaiah 51:4 reads, "For a Torah will emerge from Me." In the World to Come, a new Torah ruling will emerge directly from God. The conventional laws of slaughter, which were given for this world and its conditions, will be superseded by a divine ruling specific to the end of days. What is forbidden now will be permitted then — not because the law doesn't matter, but because the same God who gave the law can also issue a new ruling from the same authority.

Rabbi Berekhya, citing Rabbi Yitzchak, extends this further: anyone who refrained from eating forbidden foods — carcasses and animals that died outside ritual slaughter — in this world will be privileged to eat from the feast in the World to Come. The abstinence now and the feast later are connected by the same logic. Discipline is preparation. The mitzvot are not arbitrary restrictions. They are the training that makes a person fit for something beyond what can currently be imagined.

What These Monsters Actually Mean

In the Midrash Aggadah (4,331 texts), and across the Midrash Rabbah collection (3,279 texts), the Leviathan appears repeatedly as something more than a large fish. It is the embodiment of chaos at the edges of creation — the primordial force that God mastered but did not eliminate, contained but not destroyed. The Behemoth is its terrestrial mirror: massive, immovable, the brute power of the natural world concentrated into a single creature.

Together they represent the two domains that human beings cannot control — the sea and the wilderness — tamed not by human ingenuity but held in reserve by divine will. Their eventual destruction at each other's hands is the moment when those domains are finally resolved. The chaos that lapped at the edges of the ordered world since the beginning will, at the end, consume itself. The righteous will eat the chaos. They will take into themselves, as nourishment, the very forces that had threatened to swallow them throughout history.

The Tents Made of Leviathan's Hide

The imagination of the rabbis did not stop at the feast itself. The Leviathan's hide, after the battle, would be put to use. Part of it would be used to make tents for the pious — or in some versions, girdles, chains, and necklaces. The remaining portion would be stretched across Jerusalem's walls and illuminate the city with brilliant light. The creature whose eyes had illuminated the deep would, in death, illuminate the holy city. The monster's power would become the city's glory.

This is the midrashic logic at its most expansive: nothing in creation is wasted, and nothing that God made — not even the female Leviathan slain at the beginning of time and salted in a cosmic larder — goes unused. The patience required to believe this is itself a form of the faith the rabbis were describing. The Leviathan waits in the deep. The Behemoth waits in its wilderness. The righteous wait in their lives of discipline and study. And at the appointed time, everything that was held in reserve will be brought out, set before the assembled company, and revealed to have been worth the wait.