Behemoth and Leviathan

A huge animal stands over a coiled sea monster, both enclosed within a rounded world. Above them, a long arm reaches down from a gathering of human and heavenly figures, its finger pointing towards the enclosure. William Blake’s Behemoth and Leviathan turns the last great descriptions of creation in the Book of Job into a crowded encounter between different kinds of life. The two creatures dominate the picture, yet the finger descending towards them belongs to a power beyond their enclosure. ^[1]

This is the fifteenth numbered engraving in Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job. Its main inscription draws attention to Behemoth as a creature made alongside Job. The wording establishes a relationship before the reader has decided what kind of animal this extraordinary body resembles. The man looking down and the beast looking towards us belong to the same creation. Their different strengths become part of the answer Job receives after his long struggle to understand suffering. ^{[1] [2]}

A world beneath the witnesses

The globe fills most of the lower picture. Inside it, a narrow strip of land supports Behemoth, while the sea below contains Leviathan’s curling body. Trees rise behind the land animal, reeds stand at the left, and foam follows the sea creature’s movement around the bottom. Blake provides enough habitat to separate the two domains, then packs their inhabitants so tightly that each seems close to exceeding its allotted space. ^[1]

Above the globe, Job and his wife crouch together on the left of the descending arm. His forearms cross his chest, while her head bends towards him. The friends cluster on the other side. Their bent backs and lowered faces make the act of looking feel physically demanding. These people occupy a much smaller portion of the picture than the creatures they are being shown. Their familiar bodies now help us measure an unfamiliar scale. ^[1]

Two tall angels flank the gathering, their hands held near their faces. Long wings and streaming robes frame the scene, while stars punctuate the dark space behind the central divine figure. His pale halo separates his head from that darkness. One arm extends across a broad cloud; the other reaches down between the witnesses, ending in the pointing finger immediately above the globe. Looking follows a route through the picture, from his face to his hand and then into the animals’ world. ^[1]

The gesture has a useful counterpart in Job Rebuked by his Friends, where hands converge on the sufferer. Here the witnesses’ attention is redirected outwards. The pointing hand introduces something beyond the human argument. It is also remarkably empty: it carries no weapon, rope or instrument for mastering the enormous bodies below. Its action is to show them. ^[1]

The weight of Behemoth

Behemoth’s broad flank bulges towards the right edge of the globe. Deep folds descend from its shoulders; short, heavy legs bear the body close to the ground. The lowered head turns towards us, making its staring eyes conspicuous. Large curved ears and projecting tusk-like forms give the face a mixture of recognisable animal features and deliberate strangeness. A thin tail drops beside the powerful hindquarters. ^[1]

Blake makes the animal’s mass through closely organised lines. Curves follow the rounded belly and haunch, while deeper darks gather under the body and within the folds of its hide. Its feet have blunt, upright edges against the narrow ground. The beast appears planted, almost architectural, especially beside the vertical tree trunks behind it. Its strength is expressed through the capacity to stand and occupy space. ^[1]

The biblical description begins with a surprisingly ordinary action: Behemoth eats grass like an ox. God then directs Job towards its muscular belly, mighty bones and sinews. Mountains supply its food; trees and reeds shelter it; a river does not alarm it. These passages place overwhelming strength within an inhabited landscape. The animal has needs and a dwelling, even while its body exceeds Job’s ability to command it. ^[2]

Tate’s catalogue connects Behemoth with the traditional hippopotamus identification. That tradition helps explain why readers have sought a large river-dwelling animal behind the words, but Blake’s particular creature resists a single zoological label. Its tusk-like projections, curled ear and heavily folded hide must be looked at together. The engraving makes a biblical body vivid through that combination of forms, giving its strength a particular appearance while preserving its strangeness. ^{[1] [2]}

Leviathan’s coils and open mouth

Leviathan has an entirely different construction. The lower body loops into a dense coil on the left, leaving a small opening within it. Rows of overlapping scales turn around that opening, changing direction with the curve. Pointed spines project from the outer contour. Where Behemoth’s skin hangs in long folds, Leviathan’s surface is articulated into hundreds of small defensive units. ^[1]

On the right, its neck rises almost vertically into open jaws. Long, pointed teeth line the mouth; fine parallel grooves extend along the stretched throat. The head comes close to the land above, creating a tense meeting between the upright mouth and Behemoth’s planted hind leg. Along the bottom, waves and foam continue the sweep of the coil. The enclosure contains weight and movement in two sharply different forms. ^[1]

Job 41 repeatedly asks whether a person could capture, trade or domesticate this creature. Could Job pull it out with a hook, make it a servant or give it to the household as a plaything? These questions turn familiar human relationships with animals into absurd possibilities. Fishing, ownership, commerce and amusement all fail before a being that cannot be handled on those terms. ^[2]

The chapter’s attention to scales is especially close to Blake’s visible invention. The biblical plates of armour fit so tightly that air cannot pass between them. Swords, spears and arrows are then imagined failing against the body. Engraved scale follows engraved scale around the coil, giving that resistance a patient, almost tactile form. The reader can trace the surface much more easily than any imagined hunter could penetrate it. ^{[1] [2]}

The text also describes sparks, smoke and burning breath. Blake’s open mouth makes room for that terrifying poetic description, while the surrounding sea answers the passage in which Leviathan makes the deep boil and leaves a shining wake. In the monochrome engraving, tooth, throat, foam and scale carry the encounter. Its mouth opens towards the upper world, while the coiled body remains within its own turbulent habitat. ^{[1] [2]}

Why God shows Job the creatures

Behemoth and Leviathan arrive late in the biblical divine address. God has already questioned Job about the earth’s foundations, the limits of the sea, the stars and the coming of daylight. Rain falls in wilderness where nobody lives. Wild animals bear their young, range beyond the city and refuse the work people might want them to do. Creation extends beyond human knowledge and usefulness long before the two enormous creatures appear. ^[2]

That context makes the engraving more than a display of frightening animals. The globe gathers forms of life whose existence has its own dimensions, appetites and powers. Job can look at them, but he cannot reduce them to the scale of his household or the terms of his dispute. Blake places him outside their enclosure, receiving a view of a world in which human concerns no longer fill the whole field. ^{[1] [2]}

Chapter 40 also gives the address an explicitly moral pressure. Before describing Behemoth, God asks whether Job can abase the proud, bring down the wicked and save himself by his own right hand. Leviathan’s description ends with its kingship over the children of pride. These passages connect overwhelming physical strength with questions of judgement and mastery. The scene asks who can comprehend and govern such powers, as well as who can survive them. ^[2]

Job’s response begins before the animals are described. At the opening of chapter 40 he falls silent and places his hand upon his mouth. After the divine speeches, in chapter 42, he acknowledges having spoken about things beyond his understanding and distinguishes his earlier hearing from his present seeing. Blake’s bowed witnesses give a bodily form to this altered relationship with knowledge. They are being brought into an experience that their previous argument could not provide. ^[2]

This change does not vindicate every accusation made against Job. The same final chapter rebukes the friends for speaking wrongly about God and asks for Job’s intercession on their behalf. Humility before creation and condemnation of the sufferer are different judgements within the biblical story. Keeping them distinct preserves the force of Blake’s scene: an expansion of vision can answer human certainty without making cruelty wise. ^[2]

Clouds around the argument

The right margin names both creatures through their biblical distinctions: Behemoth’s pre-eminence among God’s works and Leviathan’s rule over pride. The other inscriptions move towards weather. Above the central picture, words about the spreading clouds and the sound of God’s tabernacle occupy an outlined bank of cloud. Down the left, further words describe thick and bright clouds moving under divine counsel. ^{[1] [2]}

Those weather passages come from Elihu’s speech in Job 36 and 37, before God answers from the whirlwind. The top inscription corresponds to Job 36:29; the left combines wording from 37:11–12. Blake brings them beside the creatures described later, joining different stages of the biblical address on one printed page. Clouds become an environment for the vision and a subject of questioning in their own right. ^[2]

There is a striking difference between the cloud held by the divine figure and the clouds drawn around the writing. In the central scene, dense shading gives the great horizontal form a rounded weight. Outside it, a few slender lines leave most of the paper open. Two lightly drawn human figures bend around the upper corners, while elongated bodies descend along the sides. The border has its own inhabitants and motions, inviting the eye to move between the compact vision and its surrounding words. ^[1]

Penelope Minney gives the cloud passages particular importance in her study of Blake’s Job illustrations. She reads darkness and cloud as conditions of divine vision, and the great creatures as necessary counterparts within creation. Her argument directs attention to the source of what Job sees: the darkness surrounding the revelation need not make it false or empty. The monsters remain within the vision he has been given. ^[13]

Nature, war and the globe

Other readings place greater emphasis on the enclosure beneath the witnesses. Martin Butlin’s Tate catalogue reports Bo Lindberg’s interpretation of the globe as Hell and of its rounded form as a challenge to scientific cosmology. Tate’s later display label also presents a reading in which the beasts express the hopelessness of material nature and expose limitations in Job’s faith. These arguments give the globe a spiritual meaning extending beyond its visible division into land and sea. ^[1]

The separation between the observers and the globe gives such arguments a concrete starting point. The witnesses occupy a starry region above the bounded land and sea. Yet the principal inscription simultaneously insists on a common maker for Job and Behemoth. The image therefore holds separation and relationship together. Its geometry can suggest the limits of material existence while its words require the viewer to consider the beasts as fellow creatures. ^{[1] [2]}

Blake uses their names differently and explicitly in Jerusalem, plate 91. There, the Spectre constructs vast structures from the heavens and forms Leviathan and Behemoth as war by sea and land. The passage belongs to a struggle involving Los, demonstration, pride and the transformation of the Spectre. It confirms that the monsters could carry a political and destructive meaning in Blake’s imagination. It also provides a distinct literary setting, with its own actors and actions. ^[14]

Tate connects that war imagery with Blake’s separate pictures of Nelson and Pitt. The association adds a history of national power to the monsters’ possible meanings. In the Job engraving, the biblical act of showing the creatures remains decisive. The pointed finger, the enclosed habitats and the attentive witnesses give the page a structure that cannot be replaced by a pair of symbolic definitions. ^{[1] [2]}

A design and its printed impressions

The engraving bears the number 15 at the upper right and a publication formula dated 8 March 1825 below the image. Tate’s shared catalogue distinguishes that inscribed date from the completed suite’s availability in March 1826. Linnell had commissioned a second watercolour set in 1821, before making the engraving agreement in 1823. The printed suite eventually comprised twenty-one numbered illustrations and a title plate. These related undertakings have different media and histories; the engraved border belongs to this printed page’s argument. The broader sequence is explored in Illustrations of the Book of Job. ^[1]

Tate’s particular sheet, A00026, is catalogued as a line engraving on paper, dated 1825 and reprinted in 1874. Butlin identifies Tate’s set as apparently belonging to the later printing made under Linnell. The Yale Center for British Art holds a separately identified impression, B1978.43.1517, dated 1826 in its official digital record. Both preserve this composition; their individual printing histories remain separate. ^{[1] [15]}

Following the lines across the creatures reveals why the medium matters. Behemoth’s flank turns through long curves; Leviathan’s coil turns through repeated scales. The jaws open through a narrow pattern of teeth, while the human witnesses fold their arms and bodies above. Enormous powers and small gestures become legible through the same engraved discipline. The divine finger brings them into one encounter, asking Job—and the viewer—to attend to a creation whose detail exceeds a quick judgement. ^{[1] [2]}