I’ve had my Oregon “vanity” license plate for a number of years. I like to think it is a clever jest from a biblical text, but many people simply don’t get it or look at me a little blankly when I explain. But after carrying that reference around on my rear end for a decade, it’s time I preached on the text, Job 41. Our congregation’s recent reading together of Job in the Tyndale Immerse series volume Poets seems an opportune moment.
For those who have clicked the link or looked it up, you have discovered that this is the grand but enigmatic description in God’s voice of a creature named “Leviathan” in Hebrew. The first verse in the NLT we’ve been reading from begins, “Can you catch Leviathan with a hook?” But I always remember and quote it from the King James, “Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook?” Those words overlaying an Oregon salmon license plate constitute my little joke for a pastor’s vehicle which doubles as fishing transport.
A fishing pastor after my own heart, Eugene Peterson, in his The Message paraphrase, puts the question of that first verse like this, “Or can you pull in the sea beast, Leviathan, with a fly rod and stuff him in your creel?”
Various identifications have been made of the creature being named in this chapter, from an attempt to identify some actual earthly water denizen to a mythical creature, even a dragon. The Ancient Christian Commentary volume on Job says that pretty much all the church fathers interpreted Leviathan (and Behemoth in the previous chapter) as an allegorical image of Satan. And Thomas Hobbes famously named his work on the monarchical state Leviathan to evoke the creature’s majesty and power as an image for a government formed by implicit social contract.
By far the worst, in my opinion, interpretation/translation of Leviathan is the modern notion of making him a crocodile (see a footnote in the NRSV). As intimidating as that toothy amphibian might be in some situations, to my mind the crocodile inspires more of a wry grin at its shape and locomotion than awe at its size and power. And I think even ancient people were perfectly capable of capturing and caging a crocodile. I prefer to picture Leviathan as an immense mythical sea monster.
In any case, this chapter aims to declare God’s power and authority over even the most powerful and daunting of earthly, and perhaps spiritual, creatures. In verse 10, God says, “And since no dares to disturb it [Leviathan], who then can stand up to me?” In other words, since God is creator and ruler of even a creature like this, how could anyone, like Job, dare to confront God?
Thus I suggest that the church fathers’ allegorical notions were pretty much on track. No matter what great monster we confront as God’s people, whether the devil himself or some beastly government gone bad, God is in control and has sovereign power over it. If the proudest creature on earth, the king of beasts (verse 34) is still subject to God, then likewise for all the evils of life which may cause us to tremble in our boots.
As Paul says in I Corinthians 15:57 about the monster of death, “But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ,” and also says in Romans 8:39 “[nothing] in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”