Leviathan

Six occurrences in five verses, and they don't all describe the same kind of thing. Psalm 74 has God crushing its heads, Psalm 104 has it playing in the sea God made for it, and Isaiah 27 puts its death in the future. Amos 9:3 belongs beside these without being an occurrence of the word: its serpent at the bottom of the sea is a nachash, not a livyatan, and DDD's Leviathan article cites it as a mere snake on the sea floor, the dedramatized end of the tradition, against the Psalm 74 and Isaiah 27 texts that blend history and myth to magnify the monster and so magnify Yahweh. The Septuagint still renders that snake drakon, the word it uses for Leviathan and the other chaos monsters, so the two sit in one semantic field even where the theology has drained out. Job 3:8 assumes a working trade in Leviathan magic, people "skilled in rousing up Leviathan," a curse technique still attested in later Jewish Aramaic incantation bowls. Psalm 104:26 goes further than taming it and makes Leviathan a creature Yahweh formed to play with; the Hebrew is ambiguous between God playing with Leviathan and Leviathan playing in the sea, and rabbinic tradition chose the first and set it in the last three hours of the day. Later tradition (1 Enoch 60:7-9,24) makes Leviathan female and Behemoth male, Leviathan in the watery abyss and Behemoth in a hidden desert to the east, both fattened as food for the righteous at the end.