Dragons

Dragons in the Bible?

Introduction

Did you know that Genesis 1:21 speaks of dragons? The Hebrew term commonly translated as “whale” or “great sea animal” is תַּנִּין (tannîyn). This word appears a total of 28 times in the Old Testament, and in no case does it refer specifically to whales according to modern taxonomy.

In fact, the meaning of tannîyn is not limited to a sea animal, since it is exactly the same word that appears in the story of Moses’ staff. God tells him, “Throw your staff on the ground in front of Pharaoh, so that it becomes a tannîyn.” In other words, whatever this creature is, it is present both in the sea and on dry land.

Not only that, but it is also used to refer to tyrant kings. In Jeremiah 51:34 the prophet speaks of Nebuchadnezzar, evil king of Babylon, as a tannîyn who swallows the people of Israel and then vomits them up. In this same vein is Isaiah 27:1, where the prophet brings together tannîyn along with other terms of mysterious animals and monsters to speak of Israel’s enemy nations: “in that day the Lord will punish Leviathan, the serpent (נָחָש, nāḥāš) slippery, Leviathan (לִוְיָתָן, livyāṯān), the devious serpent. With his violent sword, great and mighty, he will slay hatannîn.”

Therefore, when Genesis 1:21 tells us that Yahweh created the great תַּנִּינִִם (tannînim) in the plural, it does not refer to whales, or even to one sea animal exclusively. It refers to something much, much broader, and more sophisticated. But to understand the meaning of this text, we must review three fundamental approaches with which people read Genesis chapter 1.

Three approaches to reading the Bible

Materialistic approach

First we have the materialistic approach. This is the idea that Genesis 1 was written with the intention of narrating the material formation of the universe. Those who adopt this approach go down two main paths: the creationist path, where Genesis 1 narrates that the world was literally created in seven days, or the evolutionist path, where Genesis 1 must be in harmony with the evolutionary view of modern science. Although at first glance creationists and evolutionists seem to take opposite positions, the truth is that they are two extremes of the same worldview: reading Genesis 1 as the formation of the Earth in a mechanical sense. It is to assume that the intention of the text is the same as that of the modern agenda: to describe the physical-chemical processes through which the universe was formed up to the present day.

I myself assumed for a time that this was the key interpretation of Genesis 1. I was a creationist at first, understanding the seven-day narrative literally, but the more I considered today’s scientific knowledge of the universe, the more evolutionary I became, seeking to harmonize Genesis 1 with that knowledge. I began to believe that the seven days of creation were not literal but that there were billions of years between each day. I also came to believe that Adam and Eve were not literally the first species of humans but that there were different types of homo sapiens before them, until eventually there were homo sapiens sapiens from which God chose this couple.

However, I do not believe I am alone in concluding that this is a failed enterprise. The scientistic reading of Genesis 1 by both creationists and evolutionists overlooks a fundamental issue: the Bible was written in a world very different from the world of microscopes and telescopes in which we live today. For example, when speaking of the beginning of the universe, our modern mind automatically thinks of an initial chronological point when the Big Bang occurred. Genesis 1, on the other hand, describes the beginning in the sense of that which sustains the cosmos, that which gives it form, life, beauty, purpose. In Genesis 1 the beginning of the universe, rather than an unimaginably remote chronological point, is related to the primordial divine language that shapes every aspect of the world.

For example, when I say that my origin as a person is in the Milán family, I am not making a mere biological statement. I am not necessarily referring to my genes, or to the reproduction processes through which I came into existence. Ultimately, the Milán family is an identity and as such, it transcends the purely material plane and shapes my existence in a transcendental sense. My origin, more than the physical walls of a house, is the experience of enjoying my mom’s cooking, the games and fights I had with my brothers, the festivities every year, playing ball with my neighbors. Those are the things that truly make me who I am.

Moreover, if I become strictly materialistic, the Milán family as an identity does not really exist. I would be nothing but a bunch of particles devoid of any real meaning. This materialistic view ultimately leads to nihilism, the conclusion that nothing has any real meaning in the universe, but that we live in a kind of illusion.

Those who adopt this perspective often pride themselves on their materialism and scientism, claiming that they have accepted the reality about life, and that they are not fooled by false worldviews. My point for this video is that, regardless of whether it is real or not, I have to look beyond the strictly material to find my identity, my origin, my beginning as a human being.

And when they argue about monsters like a tannîyn, Leviathan or Behemoth, curiously both sides maintain that they are dinosaurs. The difference being whether they lived together with humans a few thousand years ago or whether they became extinct hundreds of millions of years ago.

This whole materialistic and scientistic approach becomes very problematic when trying to read Genesis 1 from its cosmological perspective. But this is only part of the problem.

Spiritualistic approach

When I learned that harmonizing Genesis 1 with modern science hindered an honest reading of the text, I became disinterested in scientific issues and focused on the theological implications. Topics such as sin, salvation, divine justice, covenants, and other theological issues gained preeminence, while I viewed more earthly topics such as politics, culture, economics, etc. with disdain. Without realizing it, I was turning to another problem, which is to read Genesis 1 in a spiritualistic way.

I don’t want to get too long and technical here. Rather, I will provide a low-resolution image that will be useful. Throughout the changes that the West was going through, passing from the magical world of the Middle Ages to the world of science and humanist progress, theology was losing primacy in the Western worldview, being relegated to the realm of the speculative, unnecessary, superstitious and private. In reaction to this profound change, two theological poles began to appear on the horizon.

On the one hand, liberal theology would emerge, which, in line with modernity, would reject any supernatural dimension in the universe and treat the Bible as a frog to be dissected with modern tools. Biblical references to sea or land monsters are nothing more than superstitious representations of natural phenomena that the ancients could not explain. The Bible, like any other text considered sacred by the ancients, is full of fanciful elements. And the most we can extract from it is wisdom for the inner life of those who are interested in appreciating it. What must take precedence is empirical science, plurality of perspectives, and modern standards of objective knowledge.

At the other extreme would come the reaction of fundamentalist theology. This theology would try to defend the supernatural dimension at all costs, declaring dogmatically certain points of faith that they considered fundamental. Among these are the divine inspiration of the Bible, the incarnation of God in the person of Jesus and the atoning death of Christ for the sin of humanity. The most radical expression of fundamentalism would declare that modern science is worldly and secular, something Christians must avoid. Faith must oppose the empirical method; the spiritual must oppose the secular. The spiritual realm is good. The earthly realm is evil.

Consequently, it is a theology that promotes spiritualism—which is very different from spirituality. Fundamentalist theologians do not have much to say about the meaning of the monsters mentioned in the Bible, since their inevitable tendency is to undervalue everything that is not “fundamental”—being themselves, of course, the ones who determine what is fundamental and what is not. The important thing is to defend the Bible from the attacks of secularism. Therefore, it doesn’t really matter what is Behemoth (בְּהֵמוֹת, bĕhēmôt), Leviathan (לִוְיָתָן, livyāṯān) or a tannîyn. The crucial thing is to entrench ourselves against empirical science, defending that the Bible is Divine, that Jesus is real, and that he died for our sins.

There is much more that could be said about this, but my point for here is: although these two ways of doing theology seem to be unrelated, they actually drink from the same source. Both liberals and fundamentalists accept a supposedly radical separation between the physical dimension and the spiritual dimension. Liberal theology denies the spiritual dimension and reduces the discourse of God to a secular enterprise. Fundamentalist theology locks itself into the spiritual dimension and disconnects itself from the political, cultural, economic, and social landscape. And so, even though they are “opposites”, both currents agree that the physical and spiritual dimensions are two separate things.

This insurmountable duality between the spiritual and the secular is profoundly alien to the worldview present in Genesis 1. In fact, the first page of the Bible is about exactly that: the union of Heaven and Earth, the reconciliation of all opposites, of the high and the low, the transcendental and the earthly, the visible and the invisible.

Reading Genesis 1 as the union of the physical and the transcendental is what is known as the symbolic reading.

Symbolic approach

The symbolic vision does not focus on the spiritual to the detriment of the earthly in the spiritualistic style, nor does it secularize the text to the detriment of the metaphysical in the modern style, but rather it focuses on the constant relationship that exists between the sensible phenomena we experience and the invisible principles that give them meaning.

In other words, Genesis 1 is neither a mechanical account of how the physical world was formed in the materialistic style, nor is it simply a superstitious history of an archaic people in the liberal style, nor is it a narrative where the only important thing is the entrance of sin into the world in the fundamentalist style. In a sentence, Genesis 1 is a sacred vision of the cosmos where all the elements mentioned, from the stars to the sea monsters, embody transcendental realities.

Let’s take Genesis 1:7 as an example. We are told that in order to create the sky or firmament, God separated “the waters below from the waters above.” Pause for a moment on that sentence. “God separated the waters below from the waters above” … Doesn’t that sound strange to you? What are those waters above? Where are they? It sounds like we live inside some kind of bubble. Kind of like everything was water in the cosmos (Genesis 1:1), until God opens a space in between where you can dwell.

Those who read Genesis 1 in a materialistic way formulate all kinds of scientific theories and impose them on the text. They say, for example, that at some remote time the earth’s atmosphere was filled with water vapor, and that this is what the text refers to as “the waters above.” The problem with this theory is that the Bible continues to mention the mysterious waters above after the creation story, already in the human era. The flood is described as the release of the waters below and the waters above. The text relates that “the fountains of the deep sea were burst, and the floodgates of heaven were opened.” Something like the habitable space that God had established, was being undone.

And incidentally, the sky in this cosmology was understood as a solid dome set up precisely to hold back the waters above. The Hebrew word for sky is rachah (רָקִיעַ, rāqīaʿ) and perhaps the most direct verse about the meaning of rachah is Job 37:18. There the heavens are described in terms of being “solid as a mirror of burnished bronze.” Clearly, biblical cosmology is not thinking in terms of the mechanical nature of the cosmos. And the truth is that the Bible does not need to be defended or saved by science to stand up. But we will see that a little later.

On the other hand, liberal theologians scoff at these descriptions and see them as evidence that the Bible is highly archaic and superstitious, with little relevance to today’s science. While fundamentalist theologians are too busy with the “fundamental and truly important aspects of the Christian faith” to pay attention to the serious challenge that these images represent for today’s Western mind.

Or, in some cases, some conservative research will say that the reason Genesis mentions monsters or mythical creatures is to make it clear that the God of the Hebrews is the only real agent in the Universe. That is, Genesis is responding to the idolatry of pagan peoples and declaring Yahweh as the only God. Therefore, when we read in the Bible that God is “the God of gods and Lord of lords”, we should not really believe that there are other gods and that there are other lords. In other words, God is not really fighting against other deities or other lordships … But how then to interpret when Pharaoh’s magicians, like Moses, were able to turn their staffs into tannîyn? Where did they get the power to do so if the Egyptian deities do not actually exist? Or how to understand Psalm 82 verse 1, where it says that God sits in judgment amid the other elohim (אֱלֹהִים,‘ĕlōhîm), gods? And what about the battle of Armageddon in Revelation 16, where Yahweh confronts the neumata (πνεύματα), spirits, who work miracles on earth and gather the nations to revolt against Him? Many, many questions emerge by the idea that the Bible considers the other deities as non-existent.

In the face of all these unsatisfactory approaches, the symbolic approach offers a way that is in principle simple: to read the Bible from its own cosmological perspective. The world is, in effect, surrounded by the waters of chaos. The sky is a solid dome extended by God to stop the waters above. Monsters exist and want to bring chaos upon the earth. All these images are true descriptions about the universe. What is crucial is to understand that biblical descriptions of the cosmos do not have to be scientific to be true. Instead, they are invitations to connect with a part of us that we have long forgotten: our immediate intuition as we interact with reality.

If you suddenly lose a relative you love with all your heart, isn’t that experience like your world just collapsed? Wouldn’t the sky be falling on you, and wouldn’t the ground be letting you fall into the depths of the abyss? Would you say that such imagery is unreal, and that the only real thing is the scientific description of the atmosphere and the biochemical composition of the soil?

If your nation goes to war and falls into the hands of another nation, wouldn’t that experience be that of a flood inundating your space? Would you say that description is an illusion?

When you feel safe in a familiar environment, surrounded by people who love you and under the leadership of competent people who care about you, wouldn’t you say that your space is protected by a solid dome above you that powerfully holds back the waters of chaos?

These are not simply metaphors. Symbolic reading is not metaphorical in the sense that a metaphor is understood today. These images are as real as your very human experience. Symbolic reading connects our complex sensible experience of the world with archetypal images that make those experiences comprehensible.

This is precisely what the union of Earth and Heaven is about.

Dragons are everywhere!

With all this in mind, let us return to the central enigma of this video: what is a tannîyn? Is it a whale, a serpent, a mythical creature, a tyrannical emperor?

The symbolic answer is simple: the tannîyn is an archetypal image of the force of chaos. What better way to represent this force than with those giant creatures that inhabit the depths of the sea? Once again, the whole thing is not about a specific marine species, but about what such a creature evokes in us.

If for some reason I fall offshore in the dark of night and see a giant silhouette swimming towards me, the last thing I am going to be interested in is what science has to say about that species. What such an experience would evoke in me is: I am facing the very embodiment of chaos. Moreover, if I happened to be an expert on marine life, and I knew exactly the type of creature that was about to devour me alive, would that make any difference to my experience at that moment? The intuition is the same: I am facing chaos made flesh.

This is the main reason why the giant tannînim of the sea are mentioned in Genesis 1. I mean, if we really wanted to push the text with our materialistic concerns, we could say in an immediate sense that tannîyn refers to the largest and most inaccessible species of the ocean. But they are not referred to with the intention of providing a scientific taxonomy, but as a symbol of the chaos that surrounds the familiar space and can devour us on every conceivable level: personal, familial, national, and even global.

In fact, if we pay close attention to the text, it seems to suggest that the tannînim are uncategorizable. The text says: “And God created the great sea monsters, and every living thing that moves, which the waters brought forth after their kind, and every winged bird after its kind. And God saw that it was good.” The birds are created each after its kind, in an orderly manner. The living creatures of the sea are also created each after their kind, in an orderly manner. But the only thing we are told about the great sea tannînim is that they were created. The expression “after their kind” is omitted. In all other cases in Genesis 1, including the trees and land animals, the expression, “according to their species or kind” always appears, except with the tannînim. It is as if they were the personification of that which cannot be categorized, the very image of the undefined, the fluid, that which is always beyond our domain. And so, the tannînim are monsters in the full sense of the word, symbols of that enigmatic force that can invade your space and undermine it completely, reducing you to primordial chaos.

When we read the text in this way, we can perfectly well translate this word as “dragons” and we would not be referring to imaginary creatures at all.

Dragons are as real as a messy room, a person dominated by purposelessness, a fragmented family, a tyrannical president who devours the people and then vomits them up, a decadent country. Dragons are diseases of any kind: physical, mental, emotional, spiritual. Whenever an identity is threatened by chaos, be it a person, a family, a school, a sports team, a company, etc., we are faced with the invasion of the tannînim.

It is such a fundamental category of human experience that it cannot be avoided. Even if I deny with my words the existence of the transcendent, with my actions I am constantly avoiding dragons.

That is why even the most atheistic person does not cross the street when cars are speeding by. What stops him from crossing is not simple technical data such as the exact speed of the cars, the resistance of the human body, or the physics behind an impact. What primarily stops this person is the intuition of the nearness of death. It is the experience of the chaos that threatens to devour his existence and break him down completely. An intuition that although it has to do with biochemical processes in our brain and mechanisms of self-preservation and all that, it is not reduced to the purely material. Simply because what the person ultimately wants to preserve is the integrity of his being. And where is the being of the person? Is it physical? Who can take a microscope and find his being in his atoms? Being is an invisible principle. The person’s identity is not material. And therefore, the transcendental reason why he does not cross the street is because of the closeness of the tannînim.