This page was migrated in July 2022 from my older website, biblicalambiguities.net.
31 July 2022 Navigate 'up' to the Genesis index: index-genesis.
And God created the great sea-monsters, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kinds, and every winged fowl after its kind: and God saw that it was good. (Revised Version)
The Hebrew for sea-monsters is tanninim, a mythological concept for which there is no perfect English equivalent. In related mythology, Baal destroys Tannin prior to the creation. Isaiah 51:9 associated the term tannin with the mythical serpent Rahab, who in snippets of mythological references elsewhere is crushed or cut in pieces by Yahweh. Rahab is a figure much like Leviathan.
That the tanninim appear in Genesis 1 as simply creations rather than enemies to be fought is, in itself, interesting. Compared to the mythologies on which it draws, Genesis 1 is purged of violence, and has God more firmly in control of the creation process than nearby mythologies in which the creator-God must fight to bring order to the chaos of the primeval universe. God accomplishes the same in Genesis 1 through mere speech.
Why are they referred here specifically in this passage as "great" tanninim? In the story of the Exodus, Moses produces a tannin from a rod of wood, and perhaps it is to be understood here that the tannin of the Exodus story is a simple snake of some sort. The qualifier "great" might help distinguish the great sea-monsters of Genesis from mere snakes.
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