Leviathan at the End of the World

God created Leviathan male and female, and immediately saw the problem. Two creatures of that size, left to breed, would have destroyed the world before the first week was out. So God killed the female and salted her. He kept the male alive to play with in the sea each afternoon. This, according to the Talmud Bavli tractate Bava Batra, composed and compiled between the 3rd and 7th centuries CE, is the arrangement that has been in place since the fifth day of creation.

There is one thing that makes Leviathan repulsive despite his grandeur. His smell. The Legends of the Jews are blunt about this: the odor is so powerful that if it penetrated the Garden of Eden, it would render Paradise uninhabitable. The corpse of Rahab, the angel of the sea whom God killed at creation when Rahab refused to swallow all the primordial waters and make room for dry land, lies at the bottom of the ocean. The only reason no creature can smell it is that the sea covers the corpse completely. When Isaiah wrote that the earth shall be full of the knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea, the ancient readers understood this differently: the waters cover not the sea but the minister of the sea, the dead Rahab, whose stench would otherwise end all life above.

The Talmud Bavli in Bava Batra 74b-75a, a passage that devotes several dense folios to sea creatures and their eschatological fate, describes what will happen when the end of days arrives. God will command the angels to fight Leviathan. The angels will attack with swords. The scales will turn the blades back like straw. They will try darts and stones. These will rebound without leaving a mark. The angels will retreat. Then God will command Leviathan and Behemoth, the great land beast who grazes on a thousand hills, to fight each other. Behemoth will be killed by a blow from Leviathan's fins. Leviathan will be killed by a lash from Behemoth's tail.

From the skin of Leviathan, God will build tents to shelter the righteous at the final banquet. What is left after the tents are made will be stretched over Jerusalem as a canopy. The light streaming from this canopy will illuminate the whole world. What is left of the flesh after the righteous have eaten will be distributed among the rest of humanity, for trade.

The Ginzberg tradition adds the detail about the smell because it preserves something the Talmudic texts leave implicit: that the greatest things contain within them the seeds of their own undoing. Leviathan is magnificent and monstrous and the source of the feast that will conclude history, and he smells so bad that he cannot be allowed near the place of divine presence. His mere proximity to Paradise would destroy Paradise. The same creature who will provide the skins for the shelters of the righteous is the creature whose living body is incompatible with holiness.

The fox knew this, in the tradition preserved in the Legends of the Jews. When Leviathan sent fish to fetch the fox and bring him to the deep water, the fox told them he had left his heart on shore. He could not come without his heart. They swam him back. He jumped from their backs and danced on the land and said: if I could trick the Angel of Death, how much easier to trick you. Leviathan, reviewing his animals, had to agree. The fox was wise. The fish were fools. And Leviathan himself, the great sovereign of the deep, had been made to look ridiculous by a creature that stands at the water's edge and will not go in.

The Kabbalistic tradition reads Leviathan differently, as the symbol of the great serpent that encircles the world, the outer boundary of creation, the coiled energy that holds the cosmos in shape. But the rabbinic tradition is more domestic about it. Leviathan is salted and waiting. He will be delicious. The righteous will eat well at the end of days, and the light of his skin will be the last light the world sees before whatever comes after.

The Talmudic passage in Bava Batra 74a-75a also describes the angels' helplessness against Leviathan with a wry precision that is characteristic of that style of reasoning. The angels attack. They fail. They regroup. They fail again. God does not rescue them or give them better weapons. He simply commands the sea creature to settle matters with Behemoth instead. The great powers of heaven are no match for the great powers of the deep, and God resolves the problem not by augmenting the angels but by removing them from the field. This, too, is theology: there are forces in creation that only creation can contain. Some things only end when they meet their equal. The Ginzberg collection preserves all of this as a single continuous narrative, drawing from dozens of midrashic and Talmudic sources, insisting that the story of the world does not end in abstraction but in a feast, a canopy of light, and a final accounting between two impossible creatures at the bottom of the sea.