Leviathan

What Does the Name Leviathan Mean?

Leviathan comes from Hebrew לִוְיָתָן (Liwyatan), the name of a great sea creature in the Hebrew Bible. Its derivation is not settled. The explanation most often given connects the first part of the word to the root lwh, "to twist, coil, or wind," so that the name means something like "the twisting one" or "the coiled one." The ending -tan is sometimes linked to Hebrew tannin, a word for a sea monster or dragon, though it may instead be a suffix rather than a separate element. A different line of explanation treats the Hebrew name as related to the Ugaritic ltn (commonly written Lotan), a sea serpent in the texts from ancient Ugarit; on that view the Hebrew and Ugaritic forms are cognates inherited from a shared West Semitic tradition rather than one being borrowed from the other. These two accounts are not necessarily in conflict, and the exact derivation remains uncertain.

Leviathan Name History & Origins

Leviathan appears in several books of the Hebrew Bible. In Job 41, God describes a creature with impenetrable scales and fire-breathing breath that no human can capture. Psalm 74:14 tells of God crushing the heads of Leviathan; Psalm 104:26 places it in the sea as a creature God made; Isaiah 27:1 speaks of God punishing "Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent," and slaying the dragon in the sea. These passages belong to a wider ancient Near Eastern pattern of sea-monster combat. The Ugaritic tablets found at Ras Shamra, dated to roughly the 14th and 13th centuries BCE, tell of Litanu, a serpent linked with the sea god Yam, and the Babylonian creation epic Enuma Elish features the sea goddess Tiamat, defeated by Marduk. The Hebrew name is generally understood in relation to that shared tradition, while the biblical texts place Leviathan firmly under the power of the one God.

From a scriptural creature, Leviathan developed into a symbolic figure. Rabbinic legend treated it as a primordial sea monster, and some accounts describe the righteous feasting on its flesh in the world to come. Christian writers made it a demon or a figure of pride and envy; a list of demonic assignments attributed to Peter Binsfeld in 1589 pairs Leviathan with the sin of envy. The word reached English through Latin Leviathan, itself from the Greek Λευιαθάν (Leuiathan) used in the Septuagint, and translators of the King James Bible of 1611 kept the Hebrew-derived spelling. Thomas Hobbes took the word as the title of his 1651 book on political order, in which the state is pictured as an artificial "mortal god" composed of many people; that use added a political sense to the older one. In modern Hebrew, לִוְיָתָן is the ordinary word for "whale." As a personal given name, Leviathan is uncommon; it is encountered mainly in literary, religious, and symbolic settings, where it refers to the great sea monster of the biblical texts.