A word leviathan has be synonymous using any big monster or even animal.

Within modern Hebrew, the word "leviathan" only means "whale".

Judaism

A word "Leviathan" appears 5 days in the Bible:

I) Isaiah 27:1: "In that day the Lord with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish leviathan the piercing serpent, even leviathan that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea."

Ii) Psalms 74:14: "Thou didst crush the heads of the Leviathan, thou didst give him for food to the desert people."

Troika) Psalms 104:26: "O Lord, how manifold thy works, in wisdom you have created them all. So is this great and wide sea... there go the ships and the Leviathan which you have created to play with";

Quadruplet) Book of Job 3:8 "Lo let the night be solitary, let no joyful cry be heard in it. Let them curse it who curse the day who are ready to awake the Leviathan";

Fin) Book of Job 41:1-34: "Can you draw out a Leviathan with a hook or press down its tongue with a cord? Canst thou put a hook into his nose? or bore his jaw through with a bridal ring? Will he make many supplications to thee? Will he speak soft words to thee? Will he make a covenant with thee? To take him for thy servant forever? Will thou play with him as with a bird? Or wilt thou bind him for thy girls? Will the tradesmen heap up payment for him?... Lay thy hand upon him, thou will no more think of fighting. Behold the hope of him is in vain, shall not one be cast down even at the sight of him? None is so fierce that dare stir him up. who then is able to stand before me?...Who can open the doors of his face? His teeth are terrible round about. His scales are his pride, shut up together as with a close seal. One is near to the another, that no air can come between them. They are joined one to another, they stick together, that they cannot be sundered. By his [sneezing] a light doth shine, and his eyes are like the eyelids of morning. Out of his mouth go burning lamps, and sparks of fire leap out. Out of his nostrils goeth smoke, as out of a seething pot or caldron. His breath kindleth coals, and a flame goeth out of his mouth....His heart is as firms as stone; yea, as hard as a piece of the nether millstone....He esteemeth iron as straw, and brass as rotten wood. The arrow cannot make him flee: slingstones are turned with him into stubble....He maketh the deep to boil like a pot....he is a king over all the children of pride."

A word Leviathan is too mentioned within Rashi's comment in Genesis 1:21: "God created the great sea monsters - Taninim." Jastrow translates a word "Taninim" as a "sea monster, crocodile or large snake". Rashi comments: "According to legend this refers to the Leviathan and its mate. God created a male and female Leviathan, then killed the female and salted it for the righteous, for if the Leviathans were to procreate the world could not stand before them."

In the Talmud, the Leviathan is mentioned a total of days:

Unity) Avoda Zara (3b): "Rav Yehuda says, there are twelve hours in a day. The first three hours God sits and learns the Torah, the second three hours he sits and judges the world. The third three hours God feeds the entire world... the fourth three hour period God plays with the Leviathan as it is written: "the Leviathan which busy people use at times created to play sustaining".

2) Moed Katan (25b): "Rav Ashi said to Bar Kipok: what is said at our funeral? He answered: "If a flame can fall a cedar, what hope does a small tree have? If a Leviathan can be hooked and hauled to land, what hope has a fish in a puddle?"

A festival of Sukkot (Festival of Booths) concludes with a prayer recited upon allowing the sukkah (booth): "May it be your will, Lord our God and God of our forefathers, that just as I have fulfilled and dwelled in this sukkah, so may I merit in the coming year to dwell in the sukkah of the skin of Leviathan. Next year in Jerusalem."

The comment on this prayer in the Artscroll prayer-book (p. 725) adds: "The Leviathan was a monstrous fish created on the fifth day of Creation. Its story is related at length in the Talmud Baba Bathra 74b, where it is told that the Leviathan will be slain and its flesh served as a feast to the righteous in [the] Time to Come, and its skin used to cover the tent where the banquet will take place."

There exists an additional religious anthem recited on the festival of Shavuot (celebrating the rendering of the Torah), known as Akdamut, wherein it says: "...The sport with the Leviathan and the ox [Behemoth]...When they will interlock with one another and engage in combat, with his horns the Behemoth will gore with strength, the fish [Leviathan] will leap to meet him with his fins, with power. Their Creator will approach them with his mighty sword [and slay them both]." So, "from the beautiful skin of the Leviathan, God will construct canopies to shelter the righteous, who will eat the meat of the Behemoth [ox] and the Leviathan amid great joy and merriment, at a huge banquet that will be given for them." A few rabbinic commentators say these accounts come allegoric (Artscroll siddur, p. 719), or even emblematical of the end of conflict.

Legprevent has it that in the banquet fallowing end of conflict, a carcase of the leviathan is served as a meal, along sustaining the behemoth and the ziz.

Leviathan can when well exist as interpreted as a sea itself, by owning its counterparts behemoth existence a l& & ziz existence a air and space. A few scholars use at times interpreted Leviathan, & more information to a sea in the Old Testament, when extremely metaphoric information to seagoing piranha world health organization another time terrorized the Kingdom of Israel. Others liken a mention to Tiamat and other similar monsters world health organization represented a sea as a foe to the gods inside myths of nearby cultures.

Christian

the Christian interpretation of Leviathan is typically considered to become a demon or natural monster associated with Satan or the Devil, and held by a select few to exist when a equivalent monster as Rahab (Isaiah 51:9). A Biblical information to Leviathan pop up to keep close at hand evolved from either a Canaanite Baal cycle involving a confrontation between Hadad (Baal) and the heptad headed sea monster known as Lotan which Hadad defeats, and it too resemble a Babylonian creation epic Enûma Elish in which the storm god Marduk slays his mother, the sea monster & goddess of chaos & creation Tiamat & creates the globe and sky from either them halves of her cadaver.

A few biblical scholars considered Leviathan to represent a pre-preexisting forces of chaos. Around Psalm 74:13-14 it says "it was You who drove back the sea with Your might, who smashed the heads of the monsters in the waters; it was You who crushed the heads of Leviathan, who left him as food for the creatures of the wilderness. (JPS edition)" God repel a waters of the pre-preexistent Globe (Genesis 1:2 "the earth being unformed and void with darkness over the surface of the deep and a wind from God sweeping over the water-" [JPS edition]) & destroyed a chaotic marine monster Leviathan sequentially to shape a unformed & void Globe inside his liking.

Leviathan likewise appears in a Apocryphal Book of Enoch, generating the as punishment description of this monster's origins there mentioned when existence female, when opposed to the male Behemoth:

& that day might ii monsters exist as parted, 1 monster, the female known as Leviathan sequentially to dwell around a abysm of the ocean all over the fountains of a stream; & (the more), a male known as Behemoth, which holds his chest in an invisible desert whose title is Dundayin, east of the garden of Eden. - One Enoch 60:7-8

A bit of interpreters indicate that Leviathan occurs when symbol of man con to God, claiming that it & animals mentioned in the books of Daniel & Revelation should exist as interpreted as metaphors.

Leviathan is too periodically said to use at times been of the choose of Seraphim. Based on data from a writings of Father Sebastien Michaelis, Balberith, a demon world health organization allegedly possessed Sister Madeleine at Aix-en-Provence, accommodatingly told a priest non just a more devils possessing a nun, however added a favorite saints whose work was to oppose the children. Leviathan was 1 devil that was known as.

According to St. Thomas Aquinas, Leviathan is the demon of envy and the who is first in punishing the corresponding sinners. A select few mediaeval authors, like Collin de Plancy and Johann Weyer, considered Leviathan to be Grand Admiral of the marine regions of Hell.

Satanism

In a Satanic Bible, later a final segment, the "Book of Leviathan", authored by Anton LaVey, and based on data from virtually all Satanist groups, particularly LaVeyan Satanism, Leviathan is one of the "Four Crown Princes" & is a benumb troika, a colour blue, mans animal side, a mortal element: chaos. There, Leviathan's element is a lake, fluids existence that which person forms come primarily created of. This representing a unity of matter & anti-matter, chaos & choose, yin by having yang, and Leviathan's counsel is west, west existence wont to represent chaos & disorder.

Leviathan as a mundane animal

In the job, each Behemoth & Leviathan come utilized alongside the total of more brute that come clearly mundane, like goats, eagles, & hawks, leading numerous Christian scholars to surmise that Behemoth & Leviathan could besides exist as mundane animals. A brute virtually all typically projected for Leviathan is the Nile crocodile.

Rather a Leviathan, a Nile crocodile is aquatic, scaly, & possesses fierce dentition. Job 41:18 states that Leviathan's eyes "are like the eyelids of the morning". the bit of own likened this verse to a crocodile's eyes, which rise away from a a water system prior to a rest of its head, invoking a image of a sun rising all over the horizon.

the major difficulty of this see is that around Job chapter 41 Leviathan is described when breathing fire rather a dragon. Exponent of this watch respond by claiming that this occurs as poetic description of the crocodile's fierce hiss. It trend lines this statement by showing that horses keep close at hand been described when "snorting fire" since ancient days.

An additional difficulty is that a crocodile doesn't seem to healthy a descriptions of Leviathan given around more Bible passages, e.g. it doesn't stand multiple heads. But, around case (when a select few st& suggested) Leviathan occurs as generic term for any sea monster, so a animals described in Isaiah and a Psalms can be different, even mythic, animals.

Use as a generic term for sea monster

In the period of sea-oceangoing's Golden Age, European sailors saw Leviathan as the mammoth whale-such as sea monster, commonly a sea serpent, that devoured whole ships by floating about the vessels therefore quickly when to produce a maelstrom.

Leviathan is as well a title of Thomas Hobbes' seminal operate on a sociable contract & a creation of an idealistic state - the Commonwealth. A good deal of act has never to return into deciding how come he known as his book a "Leviathan" & one of prime drives of this is a influence & fear inside England of the powerful Spanish Armada that ruled the seas prior to existence with success discomfited by Elizabeth's navy within 1588. A state is ofttimes known as "Leviathan" around modern anti-statist literature (e.g. tremendously of a contemporary literature at the Ludwig von Mises Institute), likely in account of this.

A term "Leviathan" is typically utilized as a generic term for altogether the world big & all ingesting.

Partially due to the influence of Herman Melville's classic, Moby Dick, a Leviathan has are to exist as associated by numbers of sustaining the Sperm Whale. An case of this is inside Disney's depiction of Pinocchio's being swallowed (a la Jonah in the Bible) by the Sperm Whale, despite a fact that in the original, Pinocchio was swallowed by a "Pesce-cane", translated when "dog-fish" or even "shark".

Inside his book, In Search of Prehistoric Survivors, cryptozoologist Dr. Karl Shuker considers the Leviathan to become the myth inspired, at least within the portion, by sightings of a Mosasaur-type sea monster. Bernard Heuvelmans, in his book In the Wake of Sea Serpents (Dans le sillage des monstres marins) considered a respire to become of the "Marine centipede" nature and severity.

Occasionally sources claim a similarity between Leviathan & the seven-headed Naga of Indian and Southeast Asian mythology.