The biblical Leviathan, a sea monster, is described as follows:
Leviathan is a legendary creature whose most well-known depiction is in the Old Testament. It's a frightening sea creature with immense aggression and tremendous strength. It represents chaos and anti-divine forces. It's the archetypal sea monster.
Leviathan as a marine creature is described in depth in Chapter 41 of the Book of Job (in the Old Testament). Scales guard it, and he has formidable fangs, as well as flames and sparks coming from his mouth and, of course, smoke coming from his nostrils. Nothing can stop him; he can't be grabbed since he can break iron like paper. Anyone who looks at it is immobilized by terror. The sea boils beneath the monster's body, leaving a brilliant path and covering the depths in white froth.
Leviathan is portrayed in the Bible as "the quick and twisting serpent" or simply "the sea monster," and was later used to allude to the chaos that existed before creation, which was conquered when God established order.
Leviathan's Destruction (G. Doré)
The Babylonian goddess Tiamat, the mother of all universes and the primal goddess of the oceans and salt waters, may have inspired the fable Leviathan. In traditional iconography, she is shown as a sea snake or dragon, however Assyriologist Alexander Heidel disagrees, claiming that "dragon or sea serpent shape cannot be assigned to Tiamat with confidence."
Tiamat gave birth to dragons and serpents amid a more general list of monsters, including scorpion-men, sirens, and merfolk, according to the Enûma Elish, however she is not identified as a dragon in other texts sharing the same narrative.
Leviathan was once known as Lotan or Lothan in Canaanite (Phoenician) mythology (derived from lawtan). Leviathan is represented as the antagonist of the storm deity Baal and the servant of the sea god Yam in Ugaritic literature from the 14th century B.C.
The roots of the Leviathan story became obvious as being tied to the Babylonians after documents alluding to the old Canaanite creation myth were uncovered, in which Baal vanquished Lothan, much as Marduk defeated the snake Tiamat. There's also the story associated with the later ones alluding to cosmogonies, in which the pantheon's ultimate deity eliminates chaos by slaying a beast, generally a prior god.
As a metaphor, Leviathan
Others claim that the figure of Leviathan is based on Sobek, the Egyptian crocodile god and water lord. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), an English philosopher, dedicated his best-known political book, Leviathan, to the figure of Leviathan, which was turned from a sea monster to a metaphor of the State, in 1651.
Abraham Bosse's cover for Leviathan, with Hobbes' input
