Every Monster in the Bible Explained

The Serpent of Eden, the first creature in the Bible to speak, and the only one in the entire Hebrew canon to convince a human to disobey God. The story is in Genesis chapter 3. The serpent appeared in the garden. It approached the woman alone. It asked her a single question. Did God really say you could not eat from any tree in the garden? By the end of the conversation, she had eaten the fruit. She gave it to her husband. He ate it too. The text does not name the serpent. God spoke to the serpent directly, before either human, and pronounced a curse. From this day forward, the serpent would crawl on its belly and eat dust. There would be enmity between it and the woman's offspring. Its head would be bruised. The woman's heel would be struck. The book of Revelation, written more than a thousand years later, identifies the Serpent of Eden by a new name. The great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent who is called the devil and Satan. The same creature. The same lie. Different language. The Tannin. The first creature the Hebrew text of Genesis names by category, and the only one God describes himself as having personally created on the fifth day of the world. In the older Hebrew, it meant something more specific. A primal aquatic being. Often serpentine. Often plural. There were many of them. Genesis says God filled the seas with them on the fifth day before any land animal existed. In Exodus, when Moses goes before Pharaoh, his brother Aaron throws his staff to the ground and it becomes a tannin. The Egyptian magicians do the same. Aaron's tannin devours the others. The tannin appear more than 30 times in the Hebrew Bible. Whatever they were, the people who wrote those texts assumed their readers already knew. The great fish of Jonah. The most famous sea creature in any holy text on earth, and the only one whose name was never actually given. Jonah, fleeing a divine command, was thrown from a sinking ship. The great fish, sent specifically by God, swallowed him whole. He remained inside it, alive, for three days and three nights. He prayed from inside. The fish, on God's command, vomited him out onto dry land. The ancient commentaries on this passage took the question of what the fish was very seriously. The most accepted answer was that it was not a known animal at all. The fish, the older tradition claimed, was created specifically on the fifth day of creation, alongside the tannin, for the express purpose of swallowing Jonah at the appointed time. It existed for that one mission, and that mission only. After the regurgitation, the fish disappears from the text. It is never seen again. It is also never confirmed as having died. Rahab, the creature whose body the Hebrew scriptures describe as already broken when the world was made, and the only sea monster in the Bible, referred to as both a beast and a country at the same time. Psalm 89 says God crushed Rahab like a carcass. The Book of Job says God smote Rahab through the heart. Isaiah uses Rahab as another name for Egypt. The dual use is the key. Rahab was a real entity in the cosmology, a primal sea beast that existed before the ordering of the world. God killed it in the act of creating dry land. The remnants, the broken back, the still-floating carcass, became part of the structure of the universe. Egypt was Rahab, behemoth, the creature that the Book of Job describes immediately before introducing the Leviathan. Behemoth has bones like bars of iron. Its tail moves like a cedar tree. It drinks an entire river in a single mouthful without lifting its head. Spears do not pierce it. No human net could hold it. The Jordan River rushes into its mouth. Several interpretations across the older tradition see behemoth as the Leviathan's counterpart. One rules the dry world, the other rules the sea, and both are reserved by God for the end of days. The same tradition holds a quieter belief. When the world ends and the righteous gather, behemoth and Leviathan will fight each other in the final battle. Both will die. Their flesh will be served at the Feast of the Righteous. The leftover flesh, the texts say, will feed all the saved for eternity. The animal that drank rivers becomes dinner. Enjoying the video? Make sure to hit that subscribe button. It really helps me out. Let's get back to it. The Ziz The third member of a Hebrew cosmic trinity that almost nobody outside of the ancient tradition has ever heard of. The creature that rules the sky in the same way that Leviathan rules the sea and behemoth rules the land. Psalm 50 contains a single line. I know every bird of the mountains and the Ziz of the field is mine. A specific creature. A bird so enormous that when it stretched its wings, the sun was blocked. The same tradition that paired behemoth with Leviathan added the Ziz to complete the set. The three primordial monsters of creation, sea, land, and sky, were each so vast that no human eye could see all of one in a single glance. The Ziz, according to the text, could stand in the middle of the ocean and the water would only reach its ankles. Its head touched the sky. A creature too large to be described. At the end of days, according to the same tradition, all three, Leviathan, behemoth, and the Ziz, will be slaughtered together. Their flesh will feed the righteous at the final banquet. The Ziz, which mankind has never seen, will be carved and served on the same table as the other two. Abaddon. A figure who appears only once in the New Testament as the king of an army of locusts that is released onto the earth at the sound of a trumpet. The book of Revelation, chapter 9. An angel blew a trumpet. A star fell from heaven. The star was given a key. The key opened the bottomless pit. The abyss. Smoke rose. Out of the smoke came locusts with the power of scorpions. They had human faces. They had hair like women. They had teeth like lions. They wore crowns of gold. Their tails could sting humans for five months without killing them. People would beg for death and not find it. These locusts had a king. The text gives his name in two languages. In Hebrew, it is Abaddon. In Greek, it is Apollyon. Both names mean destroyer. He was the angel of the bottomless pit and he ruled the swarm. He is not mentioned anywhere after Revelation 9. The locust army has its five months. Then the trumpet stops. Abaddon, with the swarm and the abyss key, goes back to whatever he was before. The beast from the sea. A monster in the book of Revelation whose physical form combines every previous beast in the same canon. The book describes a vision of a being rising out of the sea. It had seven heads. It had ten horns. Its body was like a leopard. Its feet were like a bear's. Its mouth was like a lion's. It bore the marks of mortal wounds that it healed. It spoke blasphemies for 42 months without stopping. The beast was not a single creature. It contains within it the same shape as the leopard empire from the book of Daniel. The same shape as the bear empire from Daniel. The same shape as the lion empire from Daniel. All combined. All merged into a single horror. All rising from the same sea. It demanded worship. It received it. It marked its followers on the right hand and the forehead. It is destined, in the prophecy, to be defeated only at the final battle. Every sea beast in the canon. Condensed into one body. It is still alive in the prophecy. It has not yet fought its final battle. The red dragon. The largest non-divine being in the New Testament and the only creature in the entire Christian canon explicitly identified as Satan in the same sentence as the description of his body. A woman, clothed in the sun, stood with the moon under her feet and a crown of 12 stars on her head. A second sign appeared in the sky beside her. A great red dragon with 7 heads, 10 horns, and 7 crowns on its heads. Its tail swept a third of the stars from the sky and threw them to the earth. The dragon stood before the woman to devour her child the moment it was born. The child was born. The child was taken up to God. The woman fled into the wilderness. The dragon could not reach either of them. War broke out in heaven. The archangel Michael and his angels fought the dragon. The dragon lost. He was thrown down to the earth. And the text gives his identity at the exact moment of his defeat. The great dragon was thrown down. That ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan. The deceiver of the whole world. The serpent of Eden and the red dragon of Revelation are the same creature. One conversation in a garden became seven heads and a third of the stars. The Christian canon, in its final book, named the snake that started the entire Bible. Leviathan. The largest, oldest, and best described sea beast in any holy book on earth. And the only creature in the Hebrew scriptures whose existence God uses, in his own voice, as proof that mankind will never master the world. God speaks. The text reads as a catalogue of a creature that no human will ever stand against. Its scales are joined so tightly that no air can pass between them. Its eyes are like the rising of dawn. Smoke pours from its nostrils. Its breath kindles coals. The sea boils around its body. The deep is a wake of churning water behind it. Weapons do not work. The text is specific. Spears turn to straw. Slingstones are chaff. Arrows cannot make it flee. A sword that strikes the Leviathan cannot hold. The hook that catches all fish cannot catch this one. The Leviathan has no fear. On the final day, only at the end of the world, only by God's own sword, Leviathan will be defeated. Killed at last. Between Job and Isaiah is the entire span of human history. Leviathan is undefeated for that entire span. Mankind cannot touch it. Heroes cannot touch it. Armies cannot touch it. The same tradition has Leviathan and Behemoth and the Ziz killed together at the end of days. Their flesh feeds the righteous at the final banquet. The only way a human ever touches the Leviathan is after the world has ended and it has already been served. The animal that paleontology named after this beast was found in 2008. The Leviathan in the holy text remains exactly where it was 3,000 years ago. Down there. Waiting.