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Psalms

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Psalm 104

1 Praise the Lord, O my soul! O Lord my God, you are magnificent. You are robed in splendor and majesty. 2 He covers himself with light as if it were a garment. He stretches out the skies like a tent curtain⁠ 3 and lays the beams on water in his upper rooms3. He makes the clouds his chariot and travels on the wings of the wind.⁠ 4 He makes the winds his messengers⁠ and the flaming fire his attendant.⁠ 5 He established the earth on its foundations; it will never be moved. 6 The watery deep covered it like a garment; the waters reached above the mountains. 7 Your shout made the waters retreat; at the sound of your thunderous voice they hurried off— 8 as the mountains rose up and the valleys went down—to the place you appointed for them. 9 You set up a boundary for them that they could not cross, so that they would not cover the earth again.⁠ 10 He turns springs into streams; they flow between the mountains. 11 They provide water for all the animals in the field; the wild donkeys quench their thirst. 12 The birds of the sky live beside them; they chirp among the bushes. 13 He waters the mountains from the upper rooms of his palace; the earth is full of the fruit you cause to grow. 14 He provides grass for the cattle and crops for people to cultivate, so they can produce food from the ground 15 as well as wine that makes people glad, and olive oil to make their faces shine as well as bread that sustains them. 16 The trees of the Lord receive all the rain they need, the cedars of Lebanon that he planted, 17 where the birds make nests near the evergreens in which the herons live. 18 The wild goats live in the high mountains; the rock badgers find safety in the cliffs. 19 He made the moon to mark the months, and the sun sets according to a regular schedule.⁠ 20 You make it dark and night comes, during which all the beasts of the forest prowl around.⁠ 21 The lions roar for prey, seeking their food from God. 22 When the sun rises, they withdraw and sleep in their dens. 23 People then go out to do their work, and they labor until evening. 24 How many living things you have made, O Lord! You have exhibited great skill in making all of them;⁠ the earth is full of the living things you have made. 25 Over here is the deep, wide sea, which teems with innumerable swimming creatures, living things both small and large. 26 The ships travel there, and over here swims Leviathan35 you made to play in it.⁠ 27 All your creatures wait for you to provide them with food on a regular basis. 28 You give food to them and they receive it; you open your hand and they are filled with food. 29 When you ignore them, they panic. When you take away their life’s breath, they die and return to dust.⁠ 30 When you send your life-giving breath, they are created, and you replenish the surface of the ground. 31 May the splendor of the Lord endure. May the Lord find pleasure in the living things he has made. 32 He looks down on the earth and it shakes; he touches the mountains and they start to smolder. 33 I will sing to the Lord as long as I live; I will sing praise to my God as long as I exist. 34 May my thoughts be pleasing to him. I will rejoice in the Lord. 35 May sinners disappear from the earth, and the wicked vanish. Praise the Lord, O my soul. Praise the Lord.

Texts in conversation

Compare Psalm 74:14 and Psalm 104:26

Hebrew Bible

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Summary

Psalm 74 depicts Leviathan as an enemy to be crushed, its body given as food, following an ancient Near Eastern tradition of divine victory over chaos. Psalm 104 follows a different tradition where Leviathan is a divine pet made for play in the sea.

Passages

Psalm 74:14

Hebrew Bible
12 But God has been my king from ancient times, performing acts of deliverance on the earth. 13 You destroyed the sea by your strength; you shattered the heads of the sea monster in the water. 14 You crushed the heads of Leviathan; you fed him to the people who live along the coast. 15 You broke open the spring and the stream; you dried up perpetually flowing rivers. 16 You established the cycle of day and night; you put the moon and sun in place.
600–201 BCE (scholarly estimate) Read in Psalms

Psalm 104:26

Hebrew Bible
24 How many living things you have made, O Lord! You have exhibited great skill in making all of them; the earth is full of the living things you have made. 25 Over here is the deep, wide sea, which teems with innumerable swimming creatures, living things both small and large. 26 The ships travel there, and over here swims Leviathan35 you made to play in it. 27 All your creatures wait for you to provide them with food on a regular basis. 28 You give food to them and they receive it; you open your hand and they are filled with food.
600–201 BCE (scholarly estimate) Read in Psalms

References

"... (Job 40:25-32) ... These words of YHWH to Job are intended to contrast humanity's limited capacities with God's infinite powers. They seem to allude to a lost myth in which YHWH, instead of crushing Leviathan's heads and scattering his remains, caught him like a fish and forced him to plead for his life and to accept eternal vassalage, the great monster becoming merely a plaything of his divine captor. Verse 29, in particular, recalls the mention in Psalm 104:26 of 'Leviathan that You formed to sport with.' It is possible that the psalmist has here sanitized the old myth of the Chaoskampf altogether, so that Leviathan appears ab initio as the plaything of YHWH ... The use of the slain adversary's flesh as food may owe something to the Baal-Mot cycle, because Anat sows the pulverized remains of Mot in the fields, presumably to provide soil or fertilizer for next season's crops. Here an imperfect but revealing parallel with a point in the Egyptian Osiris myth suggests itself, for the murdered god Osiris too is identified with the new grain. In all these cases the struggle that results, in various ways, in a deicide leads also to a meal in which the dead god, indirectly or directly, provides the victuals. Out of death - life. The Talmudic image of a banquet prepared from the flesh of Leviathan owes something also to the phrasing of Psalm 74:14, in which God 'left him as food for the denizens of the desert.' The booth that is to be made for the just from Leviathan's corpse recalls the creation of heaven and earth from the body of Tiamat in the Enuma Elish ..."
Jon D. Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence, Mythos (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 16, 34.

References are not endorsements of their contents. Read each reference in full to understand its author's intentions in using these texts.

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Psalm 74:14 and Psalm 104:26

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