The Last Leviathan: Jung’s Job & our Deepest Fears

Job 41:25-26

Is it a dragon? Every fin and nostril of this mythic mega-monster is described in the Creators’ final words to Job - in a speech that is grand, mythic, and deeply unsatisfying—at least if we’re expecting a direct answer to Job’s cries for justice.

Instead of explaining why Job has suffered, God unfurls a cosmic display of power, painting images of two untamed, primal forces: Behemoth and Leviathan. These are no ordinary creatures. They are the embodiment of chaos itself, ancient and unconquerable. Job, crying out for moral order, is instead given a vision of cosmic disorder.

Chapter 41 focused on the Leviathan and has intrigued readers through the ages. There is much more here than a monster - there is an allusion to the deepest forces and hidden powers of our very existence:

אֵין־עַל־עָפָר מׇשְׁלוֹ הֶעָשׂוּ לִבְלִי־חָת׃ אֵת־כׇּל־גָּבֹהַּ יִרְאֶה הוּא מֶלֶךְ עַל־כׇּל־בְּנֵי־שָׁחַץ׃ {פ}

There is no one on land who can dominate it,

“Made as it is without fear. It sees all that is haughty; It reigns over all proud beasts.”

Job 41:25-26

Why does God spend so much time and so many verses on these beasts? What does a battle with a sea monster have to do with Job’s grief?

The Leviathan is not a whale exactly although this is how those magnificent mammals are called in modern Hebrew. Nor is it new to the biblical imagination. We first meet its kind in Genesis 1:21, where it is the only creature in the creation story named explicitly, on the fifth day of Creation:

"God created the great sea monsters and all the living creatures of every kind that creep, which the waters brought forth in swarms, and all the winged birds of every kind. And God saw that this was good."

In one of the first verses he was to reflect on, the 11th Century commentator Rashi, drawing from the Talmud (Baba Batra 74b), expands on this verse with a terrifying legend:

"This refers to Leviathan and his mate, who were created male and female, but God slew the female and salted her away for the righteous in the future. If they had procreated, the world could not have withstood them."

From the very beginning, the Leviathan is a force too powerful to reproduce, too dangerous to be left unchecked. One was slain; the other still roams. It’s important to note here that the one that was slain was the female, or the feminine. This is in line with the Semitic myths in which the male god dominates its mother goddess by creating the earth. It is also evocative of the patriarchal paradigm we’re living in. What primal forces were subdued for the reality we’re in today to control and dominate?

Allusions to the Leviathan and this primal struggle can be found throughout the Bible.

In Psalms 74:13, God “crushed the heads” of Leviathan as God subdued the sea. In Isaiah 27:1, we are told that “on that day” in the future, God will finally destroy Leviathan completely. This recurring imagery—God battling sea creatures—is an echo of those older Near Eastern myths, where deities like Marduk and Ba‘al waged war against the watery chaos of Tiamat and Yam - often feminine deities.

But in Job, something is different. Here, Leviathan is not fully vanquished. God doesn’t claim to have killed it—only that He is the only one who can control it.

So what is Leviathan all about?

Carl Jung, the psychoanalytic philosopher, saw the monsters of mythology—dragons, sea serpents, cosmic beasts—not as mere legends, but as archetypes of the subconscious. They represent the chaotic forces within us, the unfathomable depths of the psyche.

In his 1952 work,Answer to Job, Jung delves deeply into the Book of Job, offering profound reflections on its themes and characters. He reflects about these deep forces of the psyche. For him, the Leviathan is not just a creature—it is the last, untamed force of the universe. It is eros, fear, and pain itself, the thing that no human can defeat. More than that - the monstrous sea creatures are not just natural forces larger than human capacity - they are the representation of the wildest and fiercest forces within us - leading all of us to oblivion. Jung wrote this book in response to immense suffering - just a few years after World War II:

“The thread by which our fate hangs is wearing thin. Not nature, but the “genius of mankind,” has knotted the hangman’s noose with which it can execute itself at any moment.”

Several centuries before Jung, in 1651, Thomas Hobbes wrote the famous treatise named “Leviathan, or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civil.” Regarded as one of the founders of political philosophy, Hobbes named his book because of this chapter in Job, and for him, the political sovereign shares many of the qualities of the mythic beast depicted here. Both the Leviathan and the ruler/sovereign power are entities that are or aspiring to be omnipotent; resist destruction, provoking fear and bent on the dominion of power.

Whether psychological, philosophical, political and all of the above - the Leviathan is here for a reason, shown by the creator to Job as the closing argument not to taunt him, not to belittle his suffering, but to reveal the real cosmic order: justice is not the foundation of creation—power is.

Job’s longing for fairness runs up against a deeper truth: even God must contend with a world that contains such a force.

Kushner comments:

“The last half of God‘s speech would seem to be an admission that the world is not perfect, but not because of any weakness or limitation on God‘s part. Our world could not be the world that God had in mind if it did not include Behemoth and Leviathan, ambition and randomness, and all the harm they can cause. God‘s world was not perfect at the end of the week of creation, it was not perfect during the time of the Bible, and it is not perfect in the 21st-century, when some babies are still born genetically impaired, and people still have trouble controlling their greed, lust, and anger.

God‘s world is not perfect because perfect means finished, as it does when we speak of the perfect tense in grammar to describe an action that is over. God‘s creative process is still going on.”

So does this respond to Job’s demand for justice?

God’s words both ignore and answer Job’s cries. On the one hand, there is no justification for suffering. On the other hand, there’s a different kind of answer, arguably more important: I too am dealing with difficult challenges, God seems to be saying. Hold onto me, I can get you through this. We do this together.

The Leviathan’s mythic role has to do with a problematic but aspirational promise, a prophetic holding on to better days, an apocalyptic vision: One day, Leviathan will be gone. One day, the untamed will be tamed, the chaos will be conquered. The final beast will be slain, and all the pain it represents—fear, loss, suffering—will be no more.

Until then, Job, and all of us, must live in the world as it is: a world where Leviathan still swims.

How will Job respond?

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