04/23/2026
We learned a lot about Leviathan in the Bible in Tuesday's conversation at the brewery. The passage we looked at says God crushed the heads of Leviathan and fed it to animals (Psalm 74:14). It implies Leviathan had multiple heads. It turns out Canaanites pictured Leviathan with 7 heads.
How Godzilla's origin helps us understand Leviathan:
Godzilla was originally created as a symbolic way to express the fear of nuclear weapons in Japan after Word War II. Godzilla co-creator Ishiro Honda explained his experience passing through Hiroshima as the war ended, "Back then, it was said that, for the next 72 years, not a single blade of grass would grow there—and that really stayed with me. So I have a kind of hatred of nuclear weapons. It's horrifying to make such terrible weapons and use them on one city and then another”
Leviathan was apparently a similar metaphor. A couple of the sources I brought in identified Leviathan was a Canaanite god, which helps explain why God is crushing it. But it's not the kind of god that ancient people worshipped (they had gods they thought were real, and gods that were poetic symbols of chaos).
So why's it in the Bible? LIt seems Leviathan can be an allegory for any kind of "larger than life" evil that's too big for us to handle, but not for God. There are 3 main examples of fears that Leviathan represented in the Bible:
1. Originally Leviathan represented the dangers of the sea and deadly natural disasters (Leviathan makes the sea rage in Job 41:31)
2. Evil human leaders & enemy armies (Pharaoh was described as a dragon telling lies in Ezekiel 29:3).
3. Spiritual evil (Satan is described as a great red dragon with 7 heads, causing a war in heaven and confusion on earth in Revelation 12).
This isn't the only interpretation of Leviathan, but it's the one I personally lean towards after studying the subject. The last mention of Leviathan (described as the 7-headed red dragon) is his defeat in Revelation 20. Here, he is seized and bound by an angel before being thrown into a lake of fire. It’s the Bible’s way of letting us know that eventually, God is going to do something about the spiritual evil we deal with in this life.
