consiglieri wrote:It has long been recognized that Psalm 74:12-17, together with other Old Testament texts, preserves a tradition relating to the Creation where God defeats in battle a sea monster dwelling in the waters of chaos.
Psalm 74:12 For God is my King of old, working salvation in the midst of the earth.
13 Thou didst divide the sea by thy strength: thou brakest the heads of the dragons in the waters.
14 Thou brakest the heads of leviathan in pieces, and gavest him to be meat to the people inhabiting the wilderness.
15 Thou didst cleave the fountain and the flood: thou driedst up mighty rivers.
16 The day is thine, the night also is thine: thou hast prepared the light and the sun.
17 Thou hast set all the borders of the earth: thou hast made summer and winter.
The Genesis account of Creation does not include this tradition, though the “sea-monsters” are given primacy of place in the creature feature, being the first animals to appear. (Although the KJV translates it as “great whales,” the footnote in the LDS edition lets us know the Hebrew is literally “great sea-monsters.”)
(In a similar way, the NRSV translates “people” in Psalm 74:14 as “creatures” in an apparent attempt to avoid the strangeness of the reading, and yet there, too, is a footnote advising that the Hebrew is literally “people.”)
Although the Genesis account omits the episode of God breaking the heads of leviathan in pieces, what appears to be an obvious referent to the incident appears in the Eden account, where another (?) serpent appears to Eve, and after causing mischief in the garden, God tells the serpent that the seed of the woman “shall bruise thy head.” (3:15) Here, yet another footnote in the LDS edition informs us that the Hebrew for “bruise” is literally “crush, or grind.”
Here, we are reminded that Isaiah describes leviathan as a “serpent” and as a “dragon that is in the sea.” (27:1)
But just who are “the people inhabiting the wilderness” to whom God gave pieces of leviathan, as described in Psalm 74?
Because this text is so firmly imbedded in a Creation context, it is unlikely the feeding of leviathan in pieces to people would be contemporaneous (there were no people at that point, according to the texts we have), but would occur at some point long afterward. If the Old Testament speaks to this issue, the most likely candidate for “the people” thus fed would be the Israelites who famously wandered in the “wilderness.”
The phrase, “Didst cleave the fountain and the flood” simultaneously evokes images of both the Creation account as well as the Exodus, when the Israelites were led through the Red Sea preparatory to entering the wilderness which they inhabited for 40-years.
While the Israelites were “inhabiting the wilderness,” Exodus 16 tells us that God did “rain bread from heaven” for them (4), and when the people saw it and asked what it was, “Moses said unto them, This is the bread which the Lord hath given you to eat.” (15)
When Israelites disobeyed Moses in leaving the manna until the morning, “it bred worms, and stank.” (20)
This is reminiscent of Jesus Christ, who in John 6 likens himself to the bread which God sent from heaven to feed the Israelites, while at the same time equating the bread with flesh:
“I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever: and the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.” (51)
The bread/flesh Jesus offers is contrasted with the bread/flesh(?) God gave to Israel in the wilderness:
“Your fathers did eat manna in the wilderness, and are dead. This is the bread which cometh down from heaven, that a man may eat thereof, and not die.” (49-50)
It appears elsewhere that the imagery of the great sea-monster/dragon/serpent of the chaotic waters that opposes God and his purposes survived into the New Testament, as Revelation informs us of the “serpent” who “cast out of his mouth water as a flood after the woman, that he might cause her to be carried away by the flood.” (12:15)
In conclusion, it seems possible the Psalmist identified the manna God fed his people in the wilderness as being the flesh of the sea-monsters God slew in primordial battle.
The Genesis account as we have it may have originally contained this primordial battle account between God and the great sea-monster/serpent, as it would not only give background to the introduction of the serpent in Eden, but also inform God’s statement to the serpent that Eve’s seed would have power to crush his head.
Finally, it is possible Jesus drew upon the same imagery of the Israelites being fed the flesh of leviathan in the wilderness when he declared that he was the true bread from heaven in John 6, and then equated the bread from heaven with flesh; thereby equating himself in some sense with the primordial Leviathan.
