Behemoth and Leviathan

William Blake was haunted by the book of Job, returning to this biblical text again and again.

What is surprising in Blake’s depiction of both Behemoth and Leviathan in his watercolours and engraving of the subject is how constrained these creatures are, encapsulated in a circle, the womb of God’s creation. Earlier, in 1794, Blake’s well-known poem ‘The Tyger’ asks a Job-like question of God concerning creatures like Behemoth and Leviathan: ‘Did he who made the Lamb make thee?’ But in Blake’s reflections on the book of Job the only questions are God’s.

In the watercolours and engraving both Behemoth and Leviathan are contained, clearly within and under God’s control, though Leviathan in particular conveys a sense of impending movement and power. God, angelic creatures, Job, Job’s wife, and Job’s three friends look on as God points to these mighty creatures, the apex of God’s creation: ‘Nothing on earth is like it. … It is king over all the sons of pride’ (Job 41:33–34 own translation). The images and the text in the margins (of the engraving) are accepting of, rather than resistant to, the mystery of bounded power and violence, whether animal (Behemoth and Leviathan) or human (thee): ‘Behold now Behemoth, which I made with thee’.

The image invites the reader to recognize the kindred nature of the great beasts, the biblical human watchers, and contemporary viewers. God’s arm links all three. The three levels of God’s reality are clearly framed: the inner circle of these most awesome of animals, the intermediate oval of the human and animal, and the outer rectangle in which God and the angels frame all in all. Here all is harmony; each has its place and power, under God. Job’s relentless interrogation of the retributive theology of his friends and the justice of God are interrupted and answered in Blake’s image. Blake captures the moment of epiphany for Job: ‘I have heard of You by the hearing of the ear; but now my eye sees You’ (Job 42:5).

References

Blake, William. 1805–10. Behemoth and Leviathan. Watercolour, available at http://collections.britishart.yale.edu/vufind/Record/1668292 [accessed 22 October 2018]

Blake, William. 1823. Illustrations of the Book of Job, ed. by Charles Eliot Norton (Boston: James R. Osgood and Co.). Available at http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/blake-blakes-illustrations-of-the-book-of-job [accessed 22 October 2018]

This monumental sculpture takes the reader/viewer within Leviathan. Though the biblical text offers a largely external array of images, there are also allusions to the ‘inside’ of Leviathan. God dares us to touch (with terror), and to ‘open the doors of Leviathan’s face’ (Job 41:14 own translation).

Anish Kapoor takes up God’s challenge, enabling us to be intimate with Leviathan by inviting our touch of the polyvinyl fabric—probably less with fear than interested apprehension—and by confronting us with the interior of God’s monumental creation.

Perhaps by becoming more intimate with Leviathan, we are offered the possibility of becoming more intimate with God. By allowing Kapoor to conduct us into Leviathan, we also find ourselves conducted into a new relationship with aspects of God’s creation. Walking within Leviathan, we experience ourselves as puny and vulnerable but also present and alive. We see the world differently through the skin and the eyes of Leviathan: ‘It looks on everything that is high; it is king over all the sons of pride’ (41:34). All is reconfigured from within this body, both the world outside and we who are inside. The emotive language of Job 40:15–24 and 41:1–34 becomes an emotional experience within the interior of Kapoor’s work. And when we find our way outside, we discover that this creation (or creature) is even bigger than it had seemed from the inside.

Leviathan has texture, has an inside and an outside; Leviathan is an experience, an encounter. Indeed, as the biblical text declares, Leviathan must be ‘beheld’ by Job and readers of Job. ‘Nothing on earth is like it’ (41:33) thus becomes not only an imaginative but also a sensory reality.

The immensity of Kapoor’s Leviathan, which fills the Grand Palais in Paris, inhabiting more than 13,000 square metres of space, can help to make a sensory reality of Leviathan, the creature, and to disclose God, the creator. ‘Behold now’ says God to Job when beginning to describe Behemoth and Leviathan (40:15). Kapoor reiterates this divine summons, providing us with access to a phenomenon that is both actual and overwhelming. Like Job, perhaps, we are bewildered but transformed.

References

Menezes, Caroline. 2013. ‘Anish Kapoor: Leviathan’, Studio International: Visual Arts, Design and Architecture, https://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/anish-kapoor-leviathan [accessed 31 May 2018]

http://www.marthagarzon.com/contemporary_art/2011/05/monumenta-2011-leviathan-anish-kapoor [accessed 31 May 2018]

This image is clearly theological. Both the linocut phrase ‘It gives sufficeint [sic] time for repentance’ and the artist’s title (in pencil at the bottom) ‘God wants his people’ declare a theological theme. What is not as clear is the reference to Job 40 and 41, until one remembers that isiZulu and isiXhosa Bible translations of these chapters translate Behemoth as ‘hippopotamus’ and Leviathan as ‘crocodile’.

Here Trevor Makhoba conjures a combined hippopotamus/crocodile beast, with millenarian nostrils (shaped from the number 2000) and tombstone teeth. The mouth of this great beast gapes at us. The attentive viewer is forced to take a step back, such is the power and threat of this open jaw. 

This image draws on the implied threat of the biblical Behemoth and Leviathan towards humans (Job 41:25, 34), and the clear incapacity of humans to control either (40:24; 41:1–8, 26–29). Indeed, this work invokes the sense in the biblical text of God’s tenuous control of these most mighty of God’s creatures: ‘He is the first of the ways of God; let his maker bring near his sword’ (Job 40:19 own translation).

In the context of a rampant HIV pandemic in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, Makhoba’s homeland, the question that haunts Makhoba’s image is: ‘Is God for or against this terrifying beast?’ 

The night sky and the stars allude, perhaps, to the beginning of Job’s lament (Job 3) where he imagines creation undone. In his anguish Job reverses the order of creation: ‘May the day be darkness’ (3:4). The stars, and the white arrows in the right-hand panel, portend redemption from the ‘black gloom’ (3:5). But the black arrows point to certain destruction for those drawn into the monstrous mouth. As with Leviathan, ‘[a]round its teeth there is terror’ (41:14). 

However, the words of Scripture, though not from the book of Job, offer words of hope: ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness’ (2 Corinthians 12:9). 

‘God wants his people’, provided they repent. Only then are we safe from Behemoth–Leviathan.