Texts in Conversation
The Apocalypse of Abraham and 2 Enoch describe Leviathan as more than a force of chaos, presenting it as part of the structure of creation itself. Leviathan remains frightening but is also pictured as necessary for the world to be held together.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
2 Enoch 26:3
Secrets of Enoch
Pseudepigrapha, Apocalypses
1 And I summoned the very lowest a second time, and said: 'Let Archas emerge solid,' and he emerged solid from the invisible. And Archas emerged, solid, heavy, and very red. 2 And I said: 'Open up, Archas, and give birth,' and he came undone, an age emerged, very great and very dark, bearing the creation of all lower things, 3 and I saw that it was good and said to him: 'Go down below, and make yourself firm, and be a foundation for the lower things,' and it happened and he went down and fixed himself, and became the foundation for the lower things, and below the darkness there is nothing else.
Date: 1–100 CE (based on scholarly estimates)
Apocalypse of Abraham 21:4
Pseudepigrapha, Apocalypses
3 and then the earth and its fruits, and what moved on it and its living beings; and the power of its people, and the godlessness of their souls, and their righteous deeds [and the beginnings of their works], and the lower regions and the destruction in it, the Abyss and its torments. 4 I saw there the sea and its islands, and its monsters and its fish, and Leviathan and his domain, and his camping place, and his caves, and the world which lay on him, and his movements, and the destruction of the world because of him. 5 I saw there streams and the rising of their waters, and their winding courses.
Date: 70–150 CE (based on scholarly estimates)
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Notes and References
"... The evidence of Leviathan’s unique status, in comparison with God’s other creatures, receives its most paradoxical expression in his role as the cosmological foundation of the entire universe. Apocalypse of Abraham 21:4 unambiguously identifies him as the axis mundi by placing the whole universe on top of the monster ... One of the instances in which an antagonistic entity appears to be envisioned as a cosmological foundation can be found in 2 Enoch, a Jewish apocalypse written, according to present scholarly consensus, in the first century CE, in the time very close to the composition of the Apocalypse of Abraham, which is usually dated by scholars to the second century CE ... in 2 Enoch one may detect the presence of two foundations - one upper “positive” foundation represented by the luminous aeon Adail, and another lower, negative, “dark” foundation, represented by Arukhas. There is a certain symmetry between the upper and lower foundations. This development is important for our study. We will encounter a similar parallelism between cosmological foundations in our study of later Jewish materials, especially in the Book of Zohar, where the role of Leviathan as a negative cosmological foundation of the universe is juxtaposed with Rabbi Simeon’s role as the positive cosmological “pillar” of the world ..."
Andrei Orlov, Supernal Serpent: Mysteries of Leviathan in Judaism and Christianity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023), 47–49.
* The use of references are not endorsements of their contents. Please read the entirety of the provided reference(s) to understand the author's full intentions regarding the use of these texts.
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