Biblion Bible Commentary
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Yahweh: Leviathan
Job 41:1-34
1 “Can you draw out Leviathan with a fish hook, or press down his tongue with a cord? · WEB
The longest description in the book is of a creature nobody can face, and its point is a question about who can stand before its maker.
Thirty-four verses, the longest sustained description of anything in the poem, and it begins with fishing tackle. Can you draw out Leviathan with a fish hook, or press down his tongue with a cord? Job 41:1.
The opening questions are all about domestication, and they are increasingly absurd. Will he beg? Will he make a covenant with you, that you should take him for a servant forever? Will you play with him as with a bird, or tie him up for your daughters? Will traders divide him among the merchants? Job 41:3–6.
Every relationship a human being can have with an animal — pet, servant, livestock, merchandise, prey — is proposed and dismissed. And the advice about trying is grimly practical: lay your hand on him. Remember the battle, and do so no more Job 41:8. You will only attempt it once.
Then the hinge of the whole speech, and everything before it has been building to this sentence. None is so fierce that he dare stir him up. Who then is he who can stand before me? Job 41:10.
The argument runs upward. Nobody is reckless enough to provoke the creature; the creature was made; therefore the question of standing before its maker answers itself. Job had asked for a hearing and said he would approach like a prince Job 31:37. He is being shown the animal first.
The next verse is God's only direct statement about obligation in the whole speech: who has first given to me, that I should repay him? Everything under the heavens is mine Job 41:11. Nobody has advanced God anything, so nobody is owed a return — which is the accuser's transaction denied from the other end, and which the New Testament quotes at the close of its longest argument about God's freedom Romans 11:35.
The description that follows is deliberately excessive. Scales shut up together with a close seal, so tight that no air can come between them Job 41:15–16. Sneezing that flashes out light; eyes like the eyelids of the morning; smoke from the nostrils as of a boiling pot; breath that kindles coals Job 41:18–21. A heart firm as the lower millstone Job 41:24.
The weapons list is an inventory of futility: sword, spear, dart, shaft, arrow, sling stone, club, javelin — iron counted as straw, bronze as rotten wood, and he laughs at the rushing of the javelin Job 41:26–29.
As with the previous creature, the text supplies every marker and no name. Readers have long proposed identifications and the passage settles none of them; what it establishes is a profile of something unassailable, and the argument works from the profile alone.
The last two verses are where the description stops being natural history. On earth there is not his equal, that is made without fear. And: he sees everything that is high. He is king over all the sons of pride Job 41:33–34.
God had told Job to look at everyone who is proud and bring him low Job 40:11. The speech ends by pointing at the one creature that is sovereign over the proud, that fears nothing, and that Job cannot touch — and then it stops. Nothing is applied, and nothing further is said.
held with reason What this mark means