Job 41:1

1 Dost thou draw the crocodile by a hoop-net, And dost thou sink his tongue into the line?! 2 Canst thou put a rush-ring into his nose, And pierce his cheeks with a hook? 3 Will he make many supplications to thee, Or speak flatteries to thee? 4 Will he make a covenant with thee, To take him as a perpetual slave? 5 Wilt thou play with him as a little bird, And bind him for thy maidens? In Job 3:8, לויתן signified the celestial dragon, that causes the eclipses of the sun (according to the Indian mythology, râhu the black serpent, and ketu the red serpent); in Psa 104:26 it does not denote some great sea-saurian after the kind of the hydrarchus of the primeval world, (Note: Vid., Grsse, Beitrge, S. 94ff.) but directly the whale, as in the Talmud (Lewysohn, Zoologie des Talm. 178f.). Elsewhere, however, the crocodile is thus named, and in fact as תּנּין also, another appellation of this natural wonder of Egypt, as an emblem of the mightiness of Pharaoh (vid., on Psa 74:13.), as once again the crocodile itself is called in Arab. el-fir‛annu. The Old Testament language possesses no proper name for the crocodile; even the Talmudic makes use of קרוקתא = κροκόδειλος (Lewysohn, 271). לויתן is the generic name of twisted, and תנין long-extended monsters. Since the Egyptian name of the crocodile has not been Hebraized, the poet contents himself in תּמשׁך with making a play upon its Egyptian, and in Arab. tmsâḥ, timsâḥ, (Note: Herodotus was acquainted with this name (χάμψαι = κροκόδειλοι); thus is the crocodile called also in Palestine, where (as Tobler and Joh. Roth have shown) it occurs, especially in the river Damr near Tantra.) Arabized name (Ew. 324, a). To wit, it is called in Coptic temsah, Hierogl. (without the art.) msuh (emsuh), as an animal that creeps "out of the…

Whether this leviathan be a whale or a crocodile is a great dispute among the learned, which I will not undertake to determine; some of the particulars agree more easily to the one, others to the other; both are very strong and fierce, and the power of the Creator appears in them. The ingenious Sir Richard Blackmore, though he admits the more received opinion concerning the behemoth, that it must be meant of the elephant, yet agrees with the learned Bochart's notion of the leviathan, that it is the crocodile, which was so well known in the river of Egypt. I confess that that which inclines me rather to understand it of the whale is not only because it is much larger and a nobler animal, but because, in the history of the Creation, there is such an express notice taken of it as is not of any other species of animals whatsoever (Gen 1:21, God created great whales), by which it appears, not only that whales were well known in those parts in the time of Moses, who lived a little after Job, but that the creation of whales was generally looked upon as a most illustrious proof of the eternal power and godhead of the Creator; and we may conjecture that this was the reason (for otherwise it seems unaccountable) why Moses there so particularly mentions the creation of the whales, because God had so lately insisted upon the bulk and strength of that creature than of any other, as the proof of his power; and the leviathan is here spoken of as an inhabitant of the sea (Job 41:31), which the crocodile is not; and Psa 104:25, Psa 104:26, there in the great and wide sea, is that leviathan. Here in these verses, I. He shows how unable Job was to master the leviathan. 1. That he could not catch him, as a little fish, with angling, Job 41:1, Job 41:2. He had no bait wherewith to deceive h…

41:1 Unlike the peaceful Behemoth (40:15-24), Leviathan was menacing (see also 3:8; Pss 74:14; 104:26; Isa 27:1). Most commentators identify Leviathan with the crocodile, with its terrible jaws (Job 41:14) and armored hide (41:15-17, 23), thrashing the water (41:31-32). But Leviathan is a fire-breathing dragon (41:18-21) that wraps its coils around the sun to cause an eclipse (3:8-9). The background for Leviathan is the seven-headed sea monster that represents chaos in ancient Near Eastern mythology. In the biblical record, this unruly maritime monster is a frequent biblical image for chaos and wickedness, whose head the Lord crushes (Ps 74:14; Isa 27:1; cp. Job 9:13; 26:12; Ps 89:9-10; Isa 30:7; 51:9). Later in the Bible, Satan is linked to the ancient serpent (Gen 3) and unruly dragon (Rev 12:9; 20:2), whose head Christ and his followers crush (Rom 16:20).