The Biblical Leviathan

The word Leviathan has been more loosely used to refer to general beasts of the ocean, whether or not they would be literal sea serpents.  Everything from observable creatures like whales to giant squids to fictional monstrosities, like the eldritch spawn in the video game Call of Cthulhu, might be called by this informal name in contemporary culture, and this title is a proper noun in the Bible.  It is a name brought up more than once, yet never with a high degree of clarity about anything more than its association with the sea and that it, like more conventional animals, is a thing that reflects a fraction of God's power and yet is something transcended by the uncaused cause of Christianity.  Is the Biblical Leviathan supposed to be an extinct species?  A singular, exceptional beast?  A veiled reference to something other than an animal altogether, or maybe even a figurative beast that does not even symbolize a particular creation or enemy of God?

Psalm 74:13-14 briefly mentions, whether this is supposed to be literal or figurative, that God crushed the Leviathan's heads and served its flesh as food to desert creatures.  This entity is called a monster of the waters and is specifically said to have multiple heads.  No further clarification is given, including about whether the Leviathan is being presented as an actual sea monster that God directly killed, a symbolic stand-in for some other thing, or a hypothetical example of what God could do to any living thing if he wished.  Isaiah 27:1 also calls Leviathan the "monster of the sea,"a "gliding" and "coiling" serpent that God will eventually kill.  Since Psalm 74 describes the beast as having already been killed and Isaiah 27 is making a then-future prediction, it is possible that the Biblical Leviathan, if a literal ocean creature, is supposed to be a species (though not necessarily a species large in number), and if figurative, a symbol of God's enemies, either demonic or human.

In the book of Job, chapter 41 in particular, the Leviathan is given far more detailed attention than anywhere else in the Bible, however.  God uses the Leviathan as an example of the wonders he is able to create.  The description at first sounds more parallel to creatures many people are familiar with, including extant (non-extinct) animals like crocodiles, but as God proceeds, he references light, flames, and smoke that come forth from Leviathan's mouth and nostrils respectively (41:19-21), adding that it resides in the depths of the sea (41:31), a place where crocodiles are not exactly reported to make their homes.  Perhaps there was intentional linguistic exaggeration on God's part, knowing that the exaggeration of the words is just that, to emphasize the grander metaphysical point God was making in the book of Job: that God is more central and greater than all of his creations, however strong, fearsome, or unique they might be.

Whatever its status as a hypothetical or real/once-living creature, the Leviathan is presented in Job as being overwhelming to merely look at for humans (41:9).  Its actual ferocity and power are stated in more than one way to be futile or very close to utterly futile for beings with human limitations.   "'Nothing on earth is its equal,'" God says (41:33), something that would certainly not apply to crocodiles in the way the book of Job insists.  All the same, Psalm 104:25-26 states that God formed the Leviathan to live and even frolic in the ocean.  It is here acknowledged as just one of many animals intended by God to dwell in the "vast and spacious" sea.  This short reference to Leviathan in Psalm 104 complements Job 41's lengthy description of this ocean life form that reflects God's creative abilities.

As for the exotic nature of an actual creature like this, it is of course logically possible for such creatures to exist or to have existed, so the Leviathan is not something that exists by logical necessity or whose existence is logically impossible.  This is not a particularly central part of Christian theology in any way, including apologetics.  It is just something very precise and often ambiguous that is repeatedly mentioned in the Bible, yet something that is still mentioned primarily to emphasize qualities of God himself rather than those of any marine animal he made, even if among them there was once a literal sea serpent.  That many extant creatures within Earth's oceans almost look outright extraterrestrial or unusual already provides sensory evidence that bizarre creatures live in the ocean even now, and the Leviathan of the Bible, if literal, would have just been a grander animal within the same general category.