The forty-first chapter of the book of Job has thirty-four
verses in an English Bible. Thirty-two of those describe a mystery beast you
and I have never seen and almost surely never will. The remaining two are
about God.
I think those two are probably the point of the chapter, no?
At least it’s as good a guess as any.
The Search for Leviathan
Still, Leviathan is an interesting concept. All the efforts
of unbelieving and quasi-believing scholarship to make him into a creature of
our present era fall more than a little flat.
He’s not a whale, a shark or a giant crocodile, as some commentators of other generations have suggested. Leviathan has
scales and a
neck. To complicate matters further, he
breathes fire. He
carves up the land with his sharp underbelly, but is
at home in the water.
Current evolutionary timelines will not accommodate the
identification of Leviathan as some sort of sea-going dinosaur, though a first
century secular historian offers a description of something not wildly dissimilar.
Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder describes the
skeleton of a forty-foot sea creature washed up on the shore at Gades, with 120 six- to nine-inch teeth and a spine a foot and a half
thick. Considering the Gades skeleton was discovered somewhere in the range of
two millennia after the time of Job, it is conceivable all kinds of
strange things lived in the ocean in Job’s day which had become extinct by the
time Pliny’s “monster” was discovered.
The Mythical
Leviathan Problem
And yet, if making Leviathan historical proves challenging
to some, making him mythical is even more of a daunting task ... at least
if we want to keep anything of value to be found in the book of Job. Identifying
Leviathan with a known sea creature is unimportant for believers — we
simply accept the existence of something outside our personal experience
because we have been told it in a context we find otherwise reliable. We trust
the Author. He has established his credibility in other ways.
Nevertheless, identifying Leviathan to Job as a known
creature of his day is an acutely important part of God’s four-and-a-half-chapter
dialogue with his servant. We may not need to know what Leviathan was, but Job
sure needed to.
The dialogue begins with God and his creation, echoing the
first chapter of Genesis, then moves into describing the awesome depths of the
sea, the power of big weather, the clouds and finally the constellations —
all very real, identifiable parts of Job’s lived experience. From there God
moves into a lengthy description of specific, real, well-known animals: lions,
mountain goats, wild donkeys and oxen, ostriches, horses and hawks. By the time
he gets to Behemoth (late in chapter 40) and Leviathan, God has used
nothing but examples from nature which even a modern reader would immediately
recognize. Indeed, God’s entire case to Job absolutely depends on Job being
familiar with the lives and habits of the creatures to which he is referring,
if not by having seen them himself, then at least by having heard reliable
accounts of them.
Biology or Tolkien?
So here’s the problem: if Leviathan is a fiction, a myth, or
just an over-hyped, bad-breathed crocodile, then the entire book of Job is every
bit as fictive. What would be the value of describing to Job a creature which
didn’t exist, let alone to detail the
futile efforts of men to injure him with their weapons if such battles never
occurred in the real world? Job would have at very least thought, if not
actually said, Hey, wait a sec, I’ve never heard of this crazy creature ...
Leviathan is the culmination of God’s argument to Job. After
God finishes, Job is fully persuaded, worshipful and repentant. But without a
real-life Leviathan, it simply isn’t much of an argument. His historicity is a
requirement. Absent it, God’s argument is every bit as credible as comparing
the power of human beings to that of Balrogs, Ents or Glaurung the Great
Worm ... except that Job had not read Tolkien.
Even if we were to decide the book of Job is merely the
product of some uninspired human author rather than the Holy Spirit carrying
along one of his servants, and that Job is a mere character in an ancient story
rather than a real person, we are still stuck with more or less the same
logical problem: Why would the writer build his storyline argument on nothing
but what can be observed by anyone in the natural world, then suddenly make the
culmination of that argument all about one or more fictitious creatures? It
makes no sense from an authorial perspective, never mind a divine one. Whether
it is God’s argument or no, to make it persuasive — let alone conclusive —
requires that readers find not just the characters in his story but also his
logic credible. Without a known, real-world creature in chapter 41, the
tale falls completely flat. And making up a Leviathan from scratch isn’t at all
necessary. Substituting whale, a shark, a hippopotamus or an elephant in
chapter 41 would have still been quite impressive while not requiring
readers to suspend their disbelief.
The Real Deal
Here’s a sensible conjecture: maybe the first readers of Job
didn’t have to suspend any disbelief. It’s quite probable at least some of them
knew what Leviathan was from first or second-hand experience. I can’t see
any other plausible explanation for this chapter.
Theologically, the existence of Leviathan is not a matter of
indifference. We cannot simply appropriate the moral lesson while rejecting the
story itself. What hangs on the historicity of Leviathan is this
two-verse statement about the power and glory of God:
“No one is so fierce that he dares to stir him [Leviathan] up. Who then is he who can stand before me? Who has first given to me, that I should repay him? Whatever is under the whole heaven is mine.”
Paul paraphrases
the third sentence of this quartet when he asks his Roman readers, some of
whom may have been familiar with both the book of Job and the writings of Pliny
the Elder, “Who has given a gift to [the Lord] that he might be repaid?”
The point he is making is basically the same point God was making to Job
thousands of years earlier. Job, who repented in dust and ashes, would have immediately
agreed.
Refusing to Hear What We Can’t Understand
But do we get the point? When the secularists attack the
idea of Leviathan as a real creature in time and space, they are not so much
fighting a battle between science and religion as they are simply refusing to
hear God whenever he declines to explain himself to their satisfaction. That is
an intolerable state of affairs. The whole point of what the writer of Job is
telling us is that God need not explain himself at all. Ever. Sometimes, in
grace, he does. But he has no obligation to, and we cannot demand it. He does
not cease to become God because we do not like what is happening around us or
because we are incapable of comprehending the reasoning behind it. If man
cannot come to grips with a mere creature God has made, how much less can he
call to account his Creator?
But when Paul makes use of the same principle of the
inscrutability of divine wisdom in Romans, exactly the same unwillingness to hear God afflicts some of his Christian readers.
How, they ask themselves, is it possible that “all Israel will be saved”?
Surely God does not mean those horrible Jews? Those people who crucified
Christ? Impossible! God cannot save Israel
in that petty, literal sense, only in the wonderful spiritual sense that Israel is really just another name for the
Church. Oh, we will allow that God may choose to save a few straggling Jews who
repent, reject their history and identity and become good Christians ...
only provided they become like us. But surely God cannot graft the Jews back into
the tree of his plans and purposes and blessing on a national basis? That would reduce the Church to a mere phase in God’s
dealings with mankind rather than the whole point of the salvation exercise.
Surely that cannot be!
There are a great many of these folks out there. You have
probably met some online. You might even be one.
From Him and Through Him and to Him ...
But when God declines to explain himself to our
satisfaction, it doesn’t really matter whether the subject under dispute is the
old creation or the new creation, the credibility of a sea creature we can’t
see or the credibility of a plan to bless a nation of Christ-rejecting
troublemakers in a future day in fulfillment of all God’s unbreakable promises.
God remains forever beyond our ability to fathom, his ways
inscrutable and past finding out. He does not take counsel from man, and unlike
everything in his creation he is an end in himself, for “from him and through
him and to him are all things”.
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