Leviathan

Leviathan (Hebrew livyatan, "twisted/coiled one") is the great sea-and-river creature of Job 41 and of Psalms 74 and 104. The closest real-world model for the physical description in Job — armoured scales, terrifying teeth, eyes like the dawn, sneezings that flash light — is the Nile crocodile (Crocodylus niloticus), which in biblical times still lived along the lower reaches of the Nile and was an object of awe to anyone who travelled to Egypt. But the biblical writers also borrow from a wider Ancient Near Eastern image-world: the chaos-dragon of the primeval sea, which in Canaanite myth the storm-god has to defeat before the world can be ordered. Scripture takes that image and subverts it: Leviathan is not God's rival but God's creature, made and played with as a pet (Psa.104.26), pulled out with a hook only by the One who made him (Job 41). In Isa.27.1 the same beast is the figure of the great enemy whom the LORD will defeat at the end of the age, and the image carries into Revelation's dragon. Leviathan is, finally, the Bible's way of saying: there is nothing too wild for the God who made it.