Am I the Sea Monster?
Job 7:17
Chaos or Creation? Is there a Divine Being watching over us with an agenda - or is it all just random evolution and survival of the fittest? The tension between different ways to look at the world is often at the heart of political-religious conflicts such as the war that gave us Hanukkah - and the ongoing debate questioning what miracles are and if they exist.
These big theological questions are among the many that Job tackles, and in this chapter he shifts from angry response to one of his friends who attempts to sooth the suffering man - and begins to address the real culprit - God.
Without knowing, as the readers do, that his misfortunes are the result of a bet between God and Satan - Job starts to question the purpose of life and the reasons for his suffering.
In his poetic protest he points at the timeless question and the perennial tension between order and chaos found in many mythic narratives and world cultures - who’s in charge and why do we even matter??
מָה־אֱנוֹשׁ כִּי תְגַדְּלֶנּוּ וְכִי־תָשִׁית אֵלָיו לִבֶּךָ׃
What are mortals, that You make much of them,
That You fix Your attention upon them?
Job 7:17
This question is not just an existential cry; it is a theological reckoning. Job’s lament surges with ancient echoes of strife between chaos and order, of Leviathan and YHWH. Beneath his words lies the primordial tension between the forces of nature and the God who claims dominion over them.
Job makes direct reference to this ancient mythology -- echoing the struggle that is already hinted at in Genesis and in different chapters of the Psalms:
הֲיָם־אָנִי אִם־תַּנִּין כִּי־תָשִׂים עָלַי מִשְׁמָר׃
Am I the sea or the Sea Serpent
That You have set a watch over me?
Job 7:12
When Job asks - Am I the Sea - he’s referencing YAMM - the ancient goddess of the sea that was there before the male god head took over - violently. The Sea Serpent is the Tanin - the Great Crocodile - made of mythic terrors.
Yamm, the sea, in ancient Semitic myth, was the great antagonist of the celestial divine. Chaotic, boundless, and fearsome, she was the primal abyss that birthed sea monsters like Leviathan, symbols of untamed power.
In Canaanite and Mesopotamian traditions, gods like Baal and Marduk battled these primordial waters - who were also their mother and consort - to assert their sovereignty.
Genesis echoes this motif, with YHWH’s spirit hovering over the Tehom—the deep, or in her original name Tiamaat —and bringing creation out of chaos. Yet, unlike the gods of myth, YHWH does not merely conquer the sea but tames it, integrating it into the divine order.
But what of Job? His lament feels like a reversal. In Job’s eyes, YHWH has not subdued the chaos but unleashed it upon him. The God who once vanquished Leviathan now seems to wield chaos as a tool of punishment. Job’s plight feels as random and destructive as the sea’s crashing waves, a reminder of the ancient, untamed forces lurking beneath creation’s veneer of order.
The theological claims of this chapter hinge on this tension. Does God’s rule truly bring order and justice, or does the chaos of Leviathan still prowl within the divine will? Job’s cries are not just personal—they are cosmic. “Why do You watch over me so closely?” he asks, echoing the fear that perhaps God’s attention is less about care and more about control.
Medieval thinkers wrestled with these questions, debating the nature of divine providence. But they often left out the sea dragon’s shadow, the mythic undertow that Job invokes. For Job, divine providence feels less like the tender guidance of a shepherd and more like the chaos of the sea—relentless, unyielding, beyond comprehension.
Perhaps Leviathan holds the key. In later chapters, God will remind Job of this primordial beast, celebrating it not as a threat but as a testament to divine creativity. Leviathan is chaos transformed, not destroyed. Could it be that Job’s suffering, like the sea, is part of a divine order that he - and we - cannot yet grasp?
Job challenges us to face the deep, to wrestle with the Leviathans in our lives and our theology. His cry is a reminder that faith is forged not in the absence of chaos but in the struggle to find meaning within it.
And in that struggle, perhaps we, too, are seen—not as pawns of a distant God but as partners in the ongoing act of creation, sometimes silent, sometimes serene, at other times howling with rage like a storm at sea.
As we light more lights tonight inside a world of so much chaos - let each flame be yet another flicker of the possible, and another expression of the timeless art of hope.
Join me to light the second Hanukkah candle tonight - LIVE from Israel at 7pm New York Time. I’ll be leading this ritual for 25 min. from the Woodstock Peace Festival. Sign up here:
https://www.labshul.org/hanukkah-5785/
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I'm as big a fan of science as I am of Torah, and I'm particularly fascinated with the science of space and quantum physics even though it is way, way, WAY over my head. Much like Torah and much like YHWH Themselves. We are only granted a minute window of time and understanding in this physical body with which to ponder The Vast. And theories abound! Two recent articles caught my attention this month; the first one was written by Avi Loeb, Baird Professor of Science, and Institute director at Harvard University, who says that Dark Matter, which no one understands, is why we and this universe exist, and quite possibly no where else: "Let me be clear: if dark matter did not exist, the Milky Way — with stars like the Sun and planets like the Earth, would never form. Terrestrial life blossomed because dark-matter maintained memory of the primordial perturbations on the scale of the Milky-Way. We owe our existence to dark matter."
The second, seemingly unrelated article was in Popular Mechanics (of all places) which talked about the theory that consciousness, human and otherwise, may actually exist in every single cell in our bodies, and the make up of all those billions of cells, each with their own type of consciousness, combines to make our individual consciousness. A cell can’t function on its own, yet our consciousness as a whole can control so many things in our own bodies; our health, or healing, our ability to create. Our planet, it’s looking like, was a one in a billion chance that couldn’t exist anywhere else, may not exist anywhere else. Earth’s survival is dictated by her attachment to the sun and the moon, but the sun is part of a larger organism held together by Dark Matter.
So maybe, each of our individual consciousnesses are combined to be part of one larger, Universal one, which combined with Dark Matter, is what we consider to be God? We are YHWH, They are us. We are both the chaos and the calm, but without YHWH what are we?