What God Will Serve at the Feast of the Righteous

The Babylonian Talmud does not treat the end of days as a vague spiritual state. It has a menu.

According to Bava Batra 74b (redacted c. 500 CE), the feast that awaits the righteous in the World to Come will be served from the flesh of the Leviathan itself. The preparations began, the Sages teach, at the moment of creation. God made the Leviathan male and female. Then He did the math. If they bred, they would destroy the world. So He killed the female, salted her flesh, and set it aside. The refrigeration, if you will, has been running for six thousand years.

The male Leviathan lives on, alone, in the deep. When it is hungry, its breath boils the surrounding waters. When it is thirsty, it digs furrows through the sea, and the water level does not return to normal for seventy years. Its eyes, Rabbi Eliezer taught when he saw a great light in the sea one night while sailing, are "like the eyelids of the morning" (Job 41:10). A rabbi once passed near the creature's eyes and mistook them for dawn.

Even the Jordan River is involved. Rav Yehuda taught in the name of Rav that the Jordan issues from the Cave of Pamyas in the north, flows through the Hula Lake and the Sea of Galilee, and rolls south until it reaches the mouth of the Leviathan. "He is confident, though the Jordan rushes forth to his mouth" (Job 40:23). The entire river empties into the creature. This is where the Jordan goes.

When the time comes, the Talmud in midrashic tradition records that Gabriel will be sent to hunt the Leviathan. But even Gabriel will not be able to finish the job alone. Only God Himself can wield the sword that cuts down this creature: "He will punish Leviathan the slant serpent, and Leviathan the tortuous serpent" (Isaiah 27:1). The sword that approaches it is described in Job as belonging to God alone (Job 40:19).

Then comes the feast. Rabbi Yohanan, whose teachings are preserved across the Talmud from the third century CE, described what the righteous will eat: the flesh of the Leviathan, served at a banquet prepared by God. The "companions" in the Song of Songs verse, "the companions hearken for your voice" (Song of Songs 8:13), are Torah scholars, and the voice they listen for is the invitation to sit down.

Whatever meat remains after the feast will be sold in the markets of Jerusalem, "they will part him among the merchants" (Job 40:30). The Sages read this verse not as a description of a commercial fishing operation but as the future economy of the messianic city.

And then the skin.

From the Leviathan's hide, God will construct a sukkah (סוכה), a booth of the kind Israel builds during the festival of Sukkot, for the most worthy of the righteous. For those slightly less deserving, a head covering. Below that, a necklace. Below that, an amulet. Whatever skin remains will be draped over the walls of Jerusalem itself, and its radiance, the Talmud says, will illuminate the entire world from one end to the other.

The logic of this is striking when you sit with it. Sukkot is the holiday of fragile shelters, built to remind Israel that the booths in the wilderness were their only protection during forty years of wandering. The first sukkah was made of palm fronds. The last sukkah will be made of sea monster hide. The shelters of the righteous grow stronger as history moves forward, but they remain shelters. Even at the end of time, the righteous will sit in a booth.

The Leviathan was never just a monster. It was a preparation. God made it male and female, killed the female on the first day, and has been keeping the male alive for six thousand years to be served at the right meal, to the right people, at the right moment. Some things in creation are not for the present age at all. They are being held, salted and patient, for what comes after.