Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Joel Stucki" <joel AT stucki.ws>]

On 7/16/06, Rochelle Altman <willaa AT netvision.net.il> wrote:
> Hate to intrude with biological data, but if you read the description of
> the leviathan, with its long snaky "arms," etc., the creature is a giant
> squid, also referred to as a Kraken. It is indeed a creature of the deeps
> (tehom) and would have been extremely frightening to men in a small boat.
> Indeed, sightings of giant squid as late as the 19th-century CE scared the
> h..l out of mariners. Tales of the "Kraken" (giant squid) overturning large
> sailing vessels persisted. (Many illustrations available, too.) Giant squid
> have tentacles up to 90 feet in length.
>
> The area between Rhodes and the current Syrian coast is squid heaven. The
> Rhodes Deep (4,000 plus feet) is deep enough to support giant squid.

No doubt Job and the other authors decided to use this animal in their
imagery after visiting the display at their local aquarium or possibly
after a field trip to Norway to compare mythologies :)

I think we are ascribing to ancient peoples a level of knowledge about
sea creatures that is completely unwarranted. There is no reason to
suppose that Leviathan is a description of a single real creature. It
is extremely unlikely that anyone before the nineteenth century CE had
any opportunity to examine a giant squid in detail. Any reports of
sighting Leviathan that may have existed for the authors to work with
were probably based on the terrified and confused accounts of multiple
sailors probably dealing with multiple animals.

I think Leviathan is a conglomeration of the most terrifying aspects
of a sea animal that the ancient mind could conceive. Trying to assert
that the ancient authors were doing more than this and were actually
trying to describe a specific animal ascribes more education than was
possible. We are talking about a barely literate society that had only
just begun any type of seafaring. It has only been in very modern
times that we have been able to discern and distinguish between the
various scary animals that sailors have been reporting since man took
to the sea.

What's more than this is I think it does an injustice to these ancient
writers. There is no need to explain their writing in modern
scientific terms. They were not claiming to be skilled in taxonomy.
They were using imagry and allusion to teach important spiritual
truths. The idea that they have to use acurate details about a real
animal to do this bars them from using the important tools of
imagination and emotion that have been employed by all great writers.

A Christams Carol by Dickens does not show that he actually believed
in ghosts, nor can the story be dismissed as without meaning since as
modern thinkers we are above believeing in ghosts. It is likewise not
very useful to claim the description of his ghosts are an early
attempt to desribe natural phenomon not understood at his time, lest
we miss the point of his story.

Joel Stucki