God Created Leviathan and Then Made a Tiny Fish to Control It

God created the sea creatures on the fifth day of creation by combining fire and water. The two elements that destroy each other joined to produce life. Most of the creatures that came from this combination have counterparts on land. The weasel, oddly, has none. And at the apex of the entire aquatic creation stands a beast so vast that the Jordan River in full flow serves as a single sip of water to quench its thirst.

Leviathan was created male and female, like the other creatures. Then God looked at what He had made and recognized the problem: two of these things reproducing unchecked would destroy the earth entirely. So He eliminated the female. Preserved her flesh in brine for the feast coming at the end of time, when the righteous will eat at a table set in the garden of Eden, and Leviathan will be the main course.

This account is from the Legends of the Jews, Ginzberg's synthesis of material drawn from Talmud tractate Bava Batra, the Midrash Rabbah, and related sources from across the rabbinic period. What is striking is not the monster itself but the precision of the management problem. God did not make Leviathan smaller. He did not make it less powerful. He simply ensured there would only be one, and then assigned it a warden.

The warden is the stickleback. A small, spiny freshwater fish. Leviathan, whose breath boils the sea when it is hungry, whose fins radiate light so bright they can obscure the sun, whose eyes illuminate the entire ocean when they open fully. This creature holds the stickleback in awe. Not fear exactly. The tradition says the great beast honors it. The smallest thing in the water keeps the largest thing in check, through some quality the sources leave unnamed. Perhaps the same quality the Book of Job points toward when God asks from the whirlwind: have you entered the springs of the sea? The answer is no, and that is the whole lesson. Creation contains things that work without being understood.

Alongside Leviathan in the hierarchy of primordial creatures stands Behemot, king of the land animals, and Ziz, the great bird of the air. Behemot eats the produce of a thousand mountains every day and drinks from a private stream, the Yubal, that flows directly from Paradise. He too was created male and female. God too intervened immediately, ending their capacity to reproduce before it could begin. The world simply could not have sustained the offspring.

What are these creatures destined for? The tradition is remarkably specific. The righteous in the world to come will have front-row seats to a battle between Leviathan and Behemot, a collision of the two greatest forces in creation. After the battle, their flesh will be served at the messianic banquet. The texts connect this reward specifically to those who denied themselves earthly spectacle and violence. Those who avoided the blood sports of the Roman circus will watch, at the end of days, the most extraordinary contest imaginable. The reward mirrors the sacrifice in a way that only a tradition capable of very long thinking could devise.

The Tikkunei Zohar, a mystical expansion on the Zohar compiled in medieval Spain, reads the same creature differently. In one passage, it speaks of a coming time when "the evil snake is removed from the sea" and a holy snake rules in its place, not a serpent of temptation but the Shekhinah (שכינה), the divine presence, able at last to manifest without obstruction. In another passage, the Tikkunei Zohar equates the Leviathan above the firmament with the Tzaddik, the righteous person, moving through the divine ocean in perfect alignment rather than in conflict with it.

The Kabbalistic tradition does not contradict the earlier rabbinic account. It extends it into a different register. The dangerous Leviathan of creation's fifth day, the one that required divine intervention before it could reproduce, becomes in the end the image of what chaos looks like when holiness has finally prevailed over it. The beast that needed a stickleback for a guard becomes the meal that celebrates the world's completion. The creature that boiled the sea with its breath becomes the symbol of a soul that has learned to swim with God rather than against Him.

Job does not receive an answer to his question about suffering. He receives Leviathan. God speaks from the whirlwind and asks: can you draw him out with a hook? Can you put a ring through his nose? He bows down before nothing. He is made king over all the children of pride. The answer to Job's suffering is not an explanation. It is a creature. The implication is that the same creation that contains Leviathan contains the answer to Job's question, and that the answer is not in the part of creation that Job can manage. It is in the part he cannot. The stickleback that controls Leviathan is itself unexplained. That is the point. The structure holds without being fully visible to the creatures living inside it.