How the Fox Beat Leviathan and What Happens Next

When God took a census of the creatures, the fox was missing. Every other animal had presented itself to Leviathan, the great serpent of the sea who held dominion over all that swam. The fox alone had not come. And Leviathan, who did not tolerate exceptions to his authority, sent his fastest fish to find the truant and bring it in.

The fish found the fox walking the shore. They told it that Leviathan was dying and wished to appoint the fox as his successor, and that they would carry it safely through the water on their backs to the throne. The fox, according to the Legends of the Jews, was suspicious from the first but curious enough to descend into the water. When the uncomfortable feeling settled in and the truth came out, that Leviathan wanted the fox's heart and not its counsel, the fox did not panic. It reproached the fish with dignified sadness: why had they not told it the truth at once? Had they, it could have brought its heart along. But foxes, the fox explained, do not carry their hearts with them while they travel. They keep their hearts in a safe place and retrieve them when needed.

The fish swam immediately back to shore to let the fox fetch its heart. The fox stepped onto dry land, shook itself, and made clear that no creature lives without its heart, that it had its heart the entire time, and that the fish had been made fools of by the same trick the fox had already used on the Angel of Death. The fish returned to Leviathan empty-handed, and Leviathan himself had to confirm the taunting judgment: the fox was wise, and the fish were fools. The story circulates through the aggadic literature as one of a cluster of fox fables, a genre the sages used to teach that cunning without greed is a virtue, not a vice.

But the story of Leviathan does not end there. The Talmud in tractate Bava Batra, compiled in the rabbinic academies of Babylonia around the fifth century CE, describes what God has planned for Leviathan since the beginning of creation. When God made Leviathan, He made it male and female, as He made all creatures. But Leviathan male and female together would have been catastrophic: if they had mated and reproduced, the offspring would have overwhelmed the world. So God killed the female immediately, salted her flesh, and preserved her. The male was castrated and left alive, kept for God's own sport, because, the Talmud notes, it is not proper to sport with a female. The male Leviathan circles the ocean still, and the Jordan River empties into his mouth at the end of the world.

The smell of Leviathan is itself a problem the rabbis acknowledged directly. Even now, the tradition says, Leviathan's corpse emits an odor so powerful that if it penetrated the air of Paradise it would make Paradise uninhabitable. The only thing holding that smell at bay is the water of the sea covering the angel Rahab, the minister of the sea whom God struck dead at the moment of creation for refusing to swallow the primordial waters. Layer on layer of cosmic containment holds the smell of Leviathan from reaching the places it cannot be allowed to reach.

At the end of days, God will summon the angels to fight Leviathan. They will come with swords. The scales will turn the blades back like straw. They will throw stones; the stones will bounce off harmlessly. The angels will retreat. Then God will command Leviathan and Behemot, the great land-beast of the thousand hills, to fight each other directly. Behemot will fall from a blow of Leviathan's fins. Leviathan will fall from a lash of Behemot's tail. Both creatures of impossible scale will die by each other's hand, which no weapon forged by angels could accomplish.

Then the feast will begin. The skin of Leviathan will be stretched into canopies, and from underneath those canopies the righteous will eat his flesh. What remains after the feast will be spread over Jerusalem as a canopy of light, illuminating the whole world. Every portion given to the righteous will be proportional to what each person deserved during their lifetime, and the tradition is explicit that there will be no envy: each person will understand why another received more.

The fox outsmarted Leviathan once, on the shore of the sea, with a story about a heart left behind. The Talmud's account makes clear that Leviathan's final defeat will not come from cleverness at all, but from God's own architecture of the end of days, planned from the moment of creation. The Legends of the Jews and the rabbinic midrashim together preserve a picture of the great sea monster that is neither merely a symbol of chaos nor simply a monster to be defeated. Leviathan is a creature of paradox: terrifying and comic, preserved and destined for the pot, the creature that the angels cannot kill but that will one day be served as a delicacy to those who lived uprightly on the shore it could never reach.