Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Welcome back to The Lord of Spirits podcast. I am Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, and my co-host, Fr. Stephen De Young, is with me from Lafayette, Louisiana. So, unlike most of our episodes, like the previous one, actually, is pre-recorded, because when this one airs, Fr. Stephen is going to be at a retreat—last time, I was at a retreat. So if you call, you’re not going to get anyone on the other end, but we should be back again live in the future.

Fr. Stephen De Young: As you hear this, I will be in Tennessee, the greenest state in the land of the free.

Fr. Andrew: Well, it is monster month here on The Lord of Spirits podcast, and we’re going to be focusing on biblical and other monsters for both of our episodes here in October. For tonight’s episode, we’re going to be talking about gigantic demonic monsters like Leviathan and Behemoth, but also some assorted and related spiritual beasts that we see in apocalyptic biblical texts.

First, though: Leviathan. I think the question most people probably start with is this: Is the Bible saying that there is some kind of gigantic sea-dragon swimming around in the ocean?

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: Yes! I knew it! [Laughter] I mean, I remember watching the movie The Abyss, I was like: I know at some point there’s got to be here; at some point there’s got to be a—but, no, there was no dragon. Disappointing.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, no. You kind of get that in Pacific Rim, a little bit. I mean, there are technically dragons, Kaiju. Close enough. So we’re going to be talking about Leviathan, this particular sea-monster here in the first half, and so we’re going to be talking a little bit about him or her, and we will be also sort of disambiguating from other sea-monsters as we go. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right, there’s a lot of things crawling down under there. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Lots o’ critters, yeah. So the one we’re talking about, Leviathan, is— “Leviathan” is sort of the standard English transliteration of the Hebrew “Lu-yetan,” which the actual Semitic root, if you know a little bit about any of the Semitic languages, they all have a tri-literal root—they have three consonants that are sort of the root of the world—and it’s LTN-equivalent in this case. So you get “Lotan” in some places, in some dialects; Ugaritic, you have “Litanu,” though that comes at the end of a big, long academic argument about how to correctly pronounce the Ugaritic version of the name, because that’s what we do for fun.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and we don’t have any Ugaritic people around to let us know how it’s supposed to… how they would say it.

Fr. Stephen: But everyone now has settled on “Litanu” for the Ugaritic. And all of those, what they sort of mean is “the twisting one” or “the writhing one.” And that is obviously evocative of a sort of sea-serpent type of creature, at least in its movements.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and I was going to say, that’s connected— I mean, there’s a lot of sort of serpentine imagery from the ancient world that emphasizes this idea, which is it’s connected with being twisted in the way you talk, being a liar. You know, it brings up Genesis 3, the serpent in the garden. So the idea of being twisty and being a serpent and being shifty and evil—this is totally a thing, but we’re not talking about all of those images together but this particular one, and not even, as you said, every kind of snake in the water, but this particular one.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, who is sort of emblematic of that; that is its emblematic feature. So when we say liturgically, “O Good One,” we’re not just saying, “Ah, he’s pretty good.” [Laughter] We’re saying: This is the One who is truly good. Same kind of idea here: This is the one that is truly twisting and writhing and subtle and slippery and all of those things.

Fr. Andrew: Right. Yeah, okay, so to help us begin to disambiguate exactly what we’re talking about, we actually— Even though this episode is pre-recorded, we’re going to “take” some calls, but they’re all pre-recorded calls. So we have one, and this was submitted by Steve who has this relevant thing to say.

Steve: Greetings, Fathers. This is Steve from Grand Rapids, Michigan. First, I just wanted to say thank you for the show. I’ve been curious about and felt drawn to Orthodoxy for many years, but this podcast finally lit the fire in me to actually go and participate, so thank you for that. My question is about yam, the Hebrew word for “sea.” I took some biblical Hebrew way back in the day at a very liberal liberal-arts college. The professor loved to try and scandalize the students by pointing out all the places modern translations de-mythologize the text. I never quite had enough of a grid for how to deal with his critiques, but thanks to this podcast—and also a shout-out to Jonathan Pageau as well—I now feel like I do.

One of my professor’s favorite examples was what he called Yam, the sea-god. It seems that any time the text would say the word yam, he’d wink an eye and kind of chuckle to himself. So I’m curious about the connection between yam the word for “sea” and more explicit references to Leviathan and Behemoth. Is every reference to the sea a reference on some level to these lesser gods? Thanks. Love the show.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so he mentions Yam, and Yam has been mentioned on this podcast before. What’s the deal? How does Yam relate to…? As he says, is every reference to the sea a reference to the god of the sea, Yam? And how does this connect to Leviathan?

Fr. Stephen: Right, so despite spelling, “Yam” has no connection to sweet potatoes of any kind.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, disappointing. Also disappointing. Y-a-m, yam.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] So he is right that yam, the word that’s just used for the sea is also the word for this sort of primordial… what is in the Baal cycle the previous most high god, this chaos force. But, I mean, that’s common in the Ancient Near East. Shemesh is just the word for “sun,” and it’s also the sun-god. Kimosh is “moon” and the moon-god.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and as we’ve emphasized before on this show, Hades is the place and the god who rules it, or Hell in Germanic mythology. So you might understand why someone might think: Okay, every time this word is mentioned, is it supposed to be evoking this notion of the god who rules it or is in it?

Fr. Stephen: Right, and this brings us back to the concept that we kind of broached last time, about the way hypostasis is used to describe ancient gods in general. We’re most used to that… So before you freak out about me using it this way here, go back and listen to the last episode if you haven’t.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, please!

Fr. Stephen: Because there are continuities and discontinuities by how it is used by the Church Fathers in terms of the doctrine of the holy Trinity and how it’s used when we’re talking about ancient gods. It’s not completely different, but there are significant differences.

And when we’re talking about pagan gods, probably the key word we need to remember in terms of that is the idea of embodiment, the idea of something serving as sort of a body or a localization or an instantiation of that spirit.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so if you’re in the water, on some level you’re interacting with Yam from the point of view of Semitic paganism, right?

Fr. Stephen: Right, in the sea, yeah. And so, if they’re going—they didn’t really go “out” to sea; they sailed pretty close to the land at this point in history—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, their boats couldn’t go too far out.

Fr. Stephen: So if you’re a pagan and you’re doing this, you’re going to be offering before you go your sacrifices and your rituals related to Dagon/Poseidon/Yam/whomever to sort of try to—

Fr. Andrew: Njörðr.

Fr. Stephen: —be friendly, make friends. [Laughter] So that when you’re out there, then, you’ll be safe. And we’re not going to go down this rabbit-trail, but this is sort of what’s at play when Jonah gets caught in the storm at sea, and all the pagans are praying to their gods to try and figure out. [Laughter] Like: “Hey, try yours! Which one did we make angry?”

Fr. Andrew: That’s fun. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: But so what we would call the material “sea”—the Mediterranean is really what we’re talking about in this case—they would say that is an embodiment of Yam, the same way the Egyptians would see the solar disk in the sky as one embodiment of Re. So in Egypt when the worship of Amun as such, the solar disk itself as such, sort of comes to the fore later on, it’s still often referred to as Amun-Re in the text; it’s not… They don’t see it as a different god; they see it as: We’re worshiping this localization or instantiation of that spirit.

All of that said, this then gets us to the relationship between Yam and Litanu, to stick with the Ugaritic language and names. So in their understandings, Yam has a whole bunch of dragons who are sort of one of the ways in which he projects his will and activity into the world, and so they sort of represent—you could use the word “hypostasis”—sort of different aspects of Yam as they go out into the world. And so Litanu in particular, or Leviathan, sort of represented his destructive power, his power like his might.

Fr. Andrew: Would they make reference then to Litanu-Yam or—I don’t know what order they would put it in?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Yam… It would be a possessive: Yam’s Litanu.

Fr. Andrew: Okay. Got you.

Fr. Stephen: The way we would talk about “Bob’s strength.” [Laughter] Because that Bob, he’s a tough guy.

Fr. Andrew: We’re not sure where he’s worshiped, but somewhere! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Oh, there’s a cult of Bob, I’m sure, somewhere. And so this is why this sort of comes up… Of course, in the first big struggle in the Baal cycle is Baal versus Yam in his sort of revolution of the gods against the previous most high god. And so in the process of him defeating Yam, he defeats Litanu, he defeats Leviathan. He overcomes sort of his power and his might, so you sort of break him down a piece at a time.

Fr. Andrew: You’ve got to defeat all the foot soldiers before you go up against the boss at the end of the level.

Fr. Stephen: Right, yeah, Yam is the end boss. But there’s also… It’s a little different [from] that, because Yam isn’t seen as totally separate.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, right. Tentacles, as it were.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, to defeat all of these dragons is to defeat Yam. So, yeah, there’s a little subtlety to it. And this is lost, by the way, by most folks like the professor we just heard about, who tend to look at ancient “mythology” through the Clash of the Titans lens, of Zeus yelling, “Release the kraken!” [Laughter] That these are just these creatures and these beings and stuff, and they basically—we’ve talked about this before several times—that ancient pagans are sort of these primitive screw-heads who don’t know anything.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right. I mean, I think it’s worth revisiting just this question. Because I started out with this sort of idea: Is there a dragon in the water? Like, in The Abyss, they go down there and there isn’t—not that they’re looking for one—but that there isn’t something there.

Fr. Stephen: Or they had diving— [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Or Yuri Gagarin goes up into space and says, “I didn’t see any God there.” And that’s one of the problems, is there’s sort of this materialist reading of ancient religion which looks at these beings and says, “Well, the way I conceive of Zeus or whoever is just as a big human who’s really powerful or whatever, and I didn’t see any of that, so there must not be any Zeus.” Or: “We took a submarine down into the water, and we didn’t see any dragon there, so there must not be one,” but even though that’s the imagery that’s used in ancient paganism depicts these things as images, as something you can see or describe or look at, that’s not the way that people actually interacted with the idea. It’s not like they went out there and they’re like: “Oh! I bet there’s a sea-serpent down there. Look, look, I can see it!” It’s rather that there’s the experience that they have of it, and then this is the kind of language that they use to describe it, because it’s kind of indescribable.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and they looked at the sea, and the sea is in motion. Storms come off of the sea. Storms swallow people up and kills them. Boats go out to sea and never come back. And in their understanding, which is not an unsophisticated understanding, for something to act, for something to do things, it has to be animated by a spirit. Things that aren’t animated by a spirit don’t do things, other than maybe decompose in the case of dead body. But decomposing, the sea seems to hold together…

Fr. Andrew: It’s funny, even in our modern materialist view of these things, we still have— like, we don’t call it that, but we still have this notion of these animating spirits, like “gravity.” It’s this force that’s acting all the time and moves things, but, well, I can’t see it, you can’t— It’s interesting. There still is this idea… Or even things like cosmic rays or radiation, or all these things that have these effects, and we can measure them, but they’re not visible. So, really, it’s in some ways an alternative take on some of the same things that ancient people were talking about.

Fr. Stephen: Right. It’s just a question of what level of consciousness you ascribe to these things, and there are scientists and philosophers of mind today who are starting to ascribe consciousness to things like the earth.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, welcome back, everybody!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah, so it’s not… While it was pooh-poohed for a long time because of the completely materialist approach to things, people are now coming back around and saying: Oh, well, yeah, maybe in some places they phrased things in an unsophisticated way, but there’s an important insight many times to be had here.

Yeah, so this assumption of—again, our 19th-century German friends—that everything just evolves and it’s all progress, and everything starts out primitive and stupid and then culminates in 19th-century Germany: one sort of through-line, maybe with a little hiccup for the “dark ages,” but other than that as onward and upward, is being abandoned now. We get it. It was dumb. [Laughter] So this understanding— We were just using the Ugaritic terms and names, but you find parallels to this understanding all over the place in the Ancient Near East. So we have these very early seals and inscriptions that show Hdd or Haydad or Hadad, depending on your pronunciation, but Hdd—this is not H-a-d-d-a-d—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which means “blacksmith” in Arabic at least; I’m not sure about other Semitic languages.

Fr. Stephen: Right. This is H-d-d are the consonants. This was the storm-god in ancient Syria that was roughly parallel to Baal in what’s now Lebanon, Phoenicia. And Hdd, we have these inscriptions and these seals of Hdd defeating a serpent, the succession myth. Marduk is sort of the actor. And part of that is defeating Tiamat, whose other Semitic name is Tehom, which is the word for “abyss.” So Tiamat, this dragon, is seen as the abyss in the same way that Leviathan or Litanu is related to Yam, whom Marduk defeats. Marduk ends up—when he defeats Tiamat, he makes the world out of her carcass, and her blood drips and becomes humans. So that’s an enchanting tale for your kids about how the world came to be.

And then we even see in Egypt—we see inscriptions and seals, these depictions of Horus, who is the sort of falcon-headed god, the god associated in that early period with the pharaoh defeating Sobek, who was the god of the Nile. Sobek had a crocodile head. So this is falcon-head guy versus crocodile-head guy, if you’re showing it to small kids; that’s how they will describe it. [Laughter] They might not say “falcon-head”; they might say “bird-head guy,” to be fair.

And then this even—because as we’ve said before, Greece is not really the first Western civilization; they’re the last Ancient Near Eastern civilization—starting in the sixth century [BC] in Greece, we start getting imagery of the hydra.

Fr. Andrew: Right, which gets defeated by Hercules, although Hercules is not exactly… He’s not the thunder-god. I mean, he’s related. He’s the son of Zeus if I recall— Oh, now I’m blanking.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and that human woman.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, exactly; he’s a demigod. And then you even get… Although, it mutates further as you get further out, I think. Like, you get Thor and Jörmungandr, but Jörmungandr is the Midgard Serpent, sort of the world-serpent, which we’re going to talk about in just a second as to why that is.

Fr. Stephen: It’s a little bit different.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, not exactly the same thing, but there is this notion, for whatever reason, of a thunder-god versus a serpent that seems to keep getting—popping up over and over again in various kinds of mythology.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and there is— With Hercules, the connection is a little more tenuous, but he is sort of the rejected, illegitimate son who has to sort of earn his place among the gods, so it’s not a true succession myth—he doesn’t go and kill Zeus—but there is sort of a… there are elements there that would connect it.

And we also have—now going even further back, going way, way back, to the long-ago time—in Sumeria, we have depictions. There’s not a depiction of a god or someone else defeating it, but there’s depictions of these seven-headed serpents that generally have horns on their head. So we don’t see somebody beating it up, but the idea of this creature, because the seven heads and the horns are typical parts of the way Leviathan, Lotan, Litanu is depicted, that depiction of such a creature goes all the way back into ancient Sumeria. So the idea of this creature, Leviathan, has been around sort of as long as human civilization has been around, as far as we could tell. And then they had various figures and understanding of defeating it, but that means they saw it as sort of the primordial threat that someone needs to defeat, that someone needs to overcome in order to establish order or create the world or both.

Fr. Andrew: Well, let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right. And so it’s worth noting that one of the frequent sort of epithets—we talked about how “Leviathan” and “Litanu” and “Lotan” mean sort of the twisting one, but one of the titles that gets applied to Leviathan over and over again, both in Ugaritic texts and in the Old Testament, in particular in Isaiah, is the “fugitive serpent.” That gets translated in weird ways sometimes in English translations: the fleeing serpent or the serpent who runs away. And that makes for some really weird reading in English, because you have somebody—God beating the serpent who runs away, and that doesn’t sound very heroic or impressive. He was trying to run away! Like, seriously? But it’s more the idea of a fugitive. That’s what “fugitive” means, actually.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it means fleeing.

Fr. Stephen: Somebody who runs away, yeah. [Laughter] So it’s not incorrect; it’s just not really capturing the idea of what’s going on.

Fr. Andrew: “I didn’t kill my wife!” kind of thing.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. “I don’t care!” [Laughter] So that in Hebrew is nachash aqallathon, and nachash, that word of the two that’s translated “serpent,” is the word that’s translated as “serpent” in Genesis 3: nachash. So there is a connection between the devil as depicted in Genesis and this creature. So there is a sort of a direct connection there in thought.

Fr. Andrew: The temptation is, since we have sort of modern, post-Enlightenment brains, we’re like: “Okay, are you saying this is the devil, that this is this creature?” But that’s just kind of not the way that these… ancient myth and its texts actually work. It’s not a taxonomy.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and it’s like we were talking about before: Is Yam Leviathan, yes or no? And the answer is: yes and no.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, often. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So is Leviathan the devil? Yes and no. [Laughter] So as we mentioned, we have to kind of disambiguate a little in terms of—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, not every snake down in the depths is the same snake.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so there’s some diversity in this. There’s a tendency, when we get onto something like this—“Oh, Leviathan! Oh, this is interesting. There’s all these parallels”—there’s a temptation sometimes to go a little crazy, and therefore every snake, every dragon, every crocodile, every everything, every lizard is Leviathan now. And we have to disambiguate a little; they’re not all the same. There’s some nuance there that you’ll miss if you try to just lump everything together. This, by the way, is where Joseph Campbell goes horribly wrong.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, is this where he goes horribly wrong?

Fr. Stephen: Yes. [Laughter] No, this is the problem with his methodology that produces all of the other problems with Joseph Campbell.

Fr. Andrew: Everything becomes about everything.

Fr. Stephen: Right, it’s just that you ignore all of the nuance and particularities in order to lump as many things as possible into the same…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which is a total problem, especially for the kind of not-very-studied approach to ancient religion that some people take, like: “Oh, look, here’s a god that seems to die and then comes back.” “Well, that must just mean that Jesus is just a rip-off from some whatever-whatever.” Like, okay, actually the differences are really important here.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and so you get Joseph Campbell saying Hercules and Christ and Luke Skywalker are the same person, and it’s like: Umm… no? [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Wait, is that Joseph Campbell in his George Lucas hypostasis? [Laughter] Sorry.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. You can watch the old PBS documentary. He literally says that. So we have to take into account not only the continuities, but also the discontinuities.

One of the most common ones that gets mixed with Leviathan is the Ouroboros imagery, the serpent or the serpent that encircles the world, the snake eating its own tail. And that is actually an ancient thing, that symbolism, but that symbolism occurs alongside the sort of Leviathan, chaos-, sea-monster imagery. It’s not the same imagery.

Fr. Andrew: Right, because in Norse mythology you’ve got the Midgard Serpent, this serpent is a binding force that kind of holds everything together, versus—which, if it comes unloosed, can cause earthquakes and all of that.

Fr. Stephen: Ragnarok and all that stuff, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: We don’t want that. Whereas Leviathan is a destructive force that’s aimed at ripping things apart: it’s the storms and the sea, that kind of stuff.

Fr. Stephen: Right, it’s chaos and death and darkness and that kind of stuff. So that’s a separate thing. In Egypt, something interesting sort of happens with Apophis. Apophis starts out in earlier periods of— Part of the story surrounding Re, the sun god, is that what we would describe as the sunset is Re entering the underworld to do battle with Apophis, who is this serpent-being, this serpent-monster. So it’s very easy to quickly jump on that and say, “Aha! See, this is another: this is the god-battling-leviathan thing,” but in this early period, the Apophis-monster is not associated with the sea in any way. Egypt has a coastline with the Mediterranean, but Apophis is not associated with the sea, because the sun didn’t set into the sea, if you’re Egyptian; the sun set into the desert. And so Apophis is sort of associated with the darkness of the sky between the stars. The sun, Re, drives out that darkness at sunrise every day. So at night, that darkness briefly becomes somewhat ascendant and then is defeated again in the morning. So that’s how it sort of originally works. But ancient people jumped to conclusions, too! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: They’re not all perfect geniuses who have all this stuff worked out?

Fr. Stephen: Right, I mean, some of them pull the Joseph Campbell move.

Fr. Andrew: Aw, man! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: During the Hyksos period, Semitic peoples—whom the Egyptians called Asiatics—invaded and took over Egypt, and they brought with them their own stories and traditions and understandings of things, so you get these Semitic stories related to Baal and Litanu, Hdd, and the serpent now come into Egypt, and this sort of assimilation takes place. So after the Hyksos period, you get depictions of Set—of Set killing a crocodile. And we can see this is, on one hand, parallel to the earlier Egyptian imagery of Horus defeating Sobek, the crocodile god, but on the other hand, Set being a god associated with death has sort of assimilated part of the chthonic Baal tradition, and so he’s sort of replaced Horus in this, in killing a crocodile. So Apophis starts out disambiguated from Leviathan, and then sort of gets pulled in later on to that Leviathan tradition once it comes to Egypt.

Fr. Andrew: And relatedly, Set has storms and disorder and violence and that sort of thing associated with him.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And, yeah, of course Re is going into the underworld to fight Apophis in the original Egyptian thing, so it just kind of gets smushed together and takes this new form.

And then finally we have to disambiguate Leviathan from Rahav. Rahav is another name for a sea-monster, a sea-serpent; it’s also described as a tanniyn, which is the Hebrew word for a dragon. It’s also described in Ugaritic sources as a fugitive serpent, as the fugitive serpent. But the book of Job, for example, mentions Rahav and Lu-yetan, Leviathan, separately, distinguishes the two. This is because, as we mentioned, Yam had several dragons. Litanu and Rahav are sort of two different dragons. They’re both associated with Yam, but they’re not always necessarily the same critter.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and, you know—point of interest—this is the same name as the harlot, Rahab, who lets the people of Israel into Jericho.

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: Not that we’re saying she is a dragon of Yam…

Fr. Stephen: No.

Fr. Andrew: ...she just had this name.

Fr. Stephen: She was a legit pagan, though, before becoming part of Israel.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, clearly.

Fr. Stephen: She had her pagan street cred all sorted out. [Laughter] Right, so with that sort of definition and disambiguation done, we’re going to go to the places where Leviathan is mentioned in the Old Testament, directly talked about.

Fr. Andrew: Yay!

Fr. Stephen: And so we’re not going through the order they were written or even the order they appear in your Bible. There’s a method to our madness; trust us. We’re going to start with Psalm 74. Psalm 74, before we get to the part of Leviathan, which starts in verse twelve, just to sort of set the context, verses one through eleven are sort of a lament; this is a psalm that’s written during the exile in Babylon, and the Temple has been destroyed, and so there’s sort of a lament for those eleven verses of the defeat of Judah, the destruction of the Temple, and how Judah’s been laid low.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and then there’s this turn in verse twelve. Thus the first word being “yet…” [Laughter] After all this bad stuff has happened. I’m just going to read verses 12 through 17 so you can hear where this turn then goes.

Yet God, my King, is from before the ages.
He has worked salvation in the midst of the earth.
You split Yam by your might;
you broke the heads of the dragons on the waters.
You crushed the heads of Leviathan;
you gave him as food for the Ethiopians.
You split open springs and brooks;
you dried up ever-flowing streams.
Yours is the day, yours also the night;
you have established the heavenly lights and the sun.
You have fixed all the boundaries of the earth;
you have made summer and winter.

I mean, this is cool, because first there’s this lament about this destruction that’s happened in Israel, and then it’s: Yet, God is the King from before the ages; he’s the one who works salvation, and then you get this description of him defeating Yam and Leviathan, feeding Leviathan to the Ethiopians, and then talking about setting the earth in order: “You split open springs and brooks; you dried up ever-flowing streams.” And then the day and the night, the seasons, the bounds of the earth. So it’s this notion that God is not just the conqueror of these beings but is also the Creator, the one who sets things in order.

Fr. Stephen: Right, there’s this move. And so this is… Well, first we should say, just in case somebody opened their Bible and didn’t see “Ethiopians”… [Laughter] So the Hebrew there literally has “those who live in the wilderness.”

Fr. Andrew: Yes, those are the ones who get to eat Leviathan. But I think it’s the Greek—the Greek Old Testament—that has the Ethiopians.

Fr. Stephen: It identifies the Ethiopians as the ones who live in the wilderness.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and the point of that identification is for a lot of people in the Mediterranean, Ethiopia is the ends of the earth. That’s the super-far-away place that is on the margins of everything. And, for more about that, listen to some of the conversations that Jonathan Pageau has had with Richard Rohlin, where they talk about Ethiopia.

Fr. Stephen: So, interestingly here, notice that the salvation that God wrought in the midst of the earth here is the creation of the world, and the way the creation of the world is described is the defeat of Yam, the defeat of chaos, and the putting in order. We get the language from the days of creation: you fixed all the boundaries of the earth, yours is the day, yours is the night, you made the heavenly lights and the sun.

Fr. Andrew: Genesis 1.

Fr. Stephen: This way of phrasing it is deliberately, as we’ve talked about many times before, taking the claims that the pagan nations made about Baal and ascribing them instead to Yahweh: No, it’s Yahweh who did this, not Baal, not Marduk—even though we’re slaves in Babylon right now—not anyone else.

Fr. Andrew: And again, a useful point to note is: There’s no struggle. God just splits Yam with his might; he just breaks the heads of the dragons. It’s not like: There was a pitched battle where it was really touch-and-go there for a while. It never is with God. He simply commands, and it’s done. Just boom. It’s a single act.

Fr. Stephen: Right, yeah. And that “split” language is also a reference to creation, too: separating the waters above from the waters below. Those are two different dragons in Neo-Babylonian stories with Marduk.

Fr. Andrew: Interesting.

Fr. Stephen: So over against what has befallen Israel—or what has befallen Judah in this case; Israel is already gone—what has befallen Judah is: Remember, this is who God is and what he has done. And, a brief note—we’re going to be developing this later on in the episode, but this whole thing about Leviathan being fed to Ethiopians, this feeding thing, this is also an imagery of this sort of order. So if you go out hunting, and you go and hunt down a wild beast, a wild beast out in the wilderness is an image of chaos, but if you go out and you hunt it and you kill it and you bring it back and you prepare it and you cook it, you have now placed it in order and it’s now providing sustenance and life.

Fr. Andrew: And it’s also worth noting, for those who have been to the services of Theophany, or been to an Orthodox baptism in the Byzantine tradition, these texts are used at Theophany in the blessing of waters and at baptism at the blessing of the waters, associating this defeat of sea-monsters with the purification of the world that happens when Christ is baptized, and then also with the purification that happens when a Christian is baptized.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and it also describes the movement that happens when water is blessed, that water within the fallen creation becomes like the sea; it becomes this destructive force of flooding, of drowning, of all of these things. But when it’s taken and it’s blessed, either by Christ’s physical presence in it or by us at the Great Blessing of the Waters, it is transformed into something that’s for sustenance and purification and healing. And so that same kind of move is happening, and we’re participating in it, in those liturgical services.

And then, of course, this psalm ends in verses 22 and 23 with an opportunity for you to plug your book. [Laughter] I mean, with an important call.

Fr. Andrew: It turns out that the phrase, “Arise, O God!” appears in multiple places in the Bible. I mean, it’s super relevant. Verses 22 and 23:

Arise, O God! Defend your cause.
Remember how the foolish scoff at you all the day.
Do not forget the clamor of your foes,
the uproar of those who rise up against you which goes up continually.

So there’s this notion, then, that, having earlier in the psalm said, “This is our God; this is what he did,” it’s essentially saying, “Would you do this again.” It’s calling on him to do it again: come against these same foes.

Fr. Stephen: Anasti is again the “Arise,” from which we get anastasis.

So that, then, is a good segue into another place where Leviathan is mentioned, and that’s in Isaiah 27, and this is right at the beginning. And it begins with: “In that day,” “that day” being the day of Yahweh, the day of the Lord.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so verses one through three.

In that day, Yahweh with his hard and great and strong sword will punish Leviathan, the fugitive serpent, Leviathan, the twisting serpent, and he will slay the dragon that is in the sea. In that day, a pleasant vineyard—sing of it!—I, Yahweh, am its keeper; every moment, I water it.

And again there’s this connection of defeating a serpent and there’s a vineyard: cultivated, nurtured land.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so this is, rather than going back to the past, projected toward the future—

Fr. Andrew: “In that day,” yeah.

Fr. Stephen: —of Yahweh defeating Leviathan in the future, and then we have this paradise imagery, of this watered garden, this watered vineyard that’s going to be reestablished. So what does that mean? Well, when we put these two things together, we understand: Well, if Leviathan got its heads crushed and got fed to Ethiopians back at the creation—and how were there Ethiopians around at the creation? anyway—then how can Leviathan still be around? Well, the answer is in that movement and that “Arise, O God”: Leviathan is still around and is lurking behind—is the spirit, the force, that’s animated the enemies of God, like the Babylonians and the others who are oppressing Israel.

And then this gets—the other place where—going back to Psalm 74 for just a second; I didn’t want to spoil—that verse twelve of Psalm 74, “Yet God my King is before the ages; he has worked salvation in the midst of the earth,” the place where you may have—if you’re Orthodox or attending an Orthodox church—heard that recently was at the Feast of the Cross last month.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s everywhere in hymns related to the cross.

Fr. Stephen: So you will get a lot of sort of lame-o explanations of that that he’s worked salvation in the midst of the earth: “Well, that means that they thought Jerusalem was in the center of the world, so that’s what they’re saying: Jesus died in the middle of the earth.”

Fr. Andrew: In Middle Earth? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Not in Middle Earth! I knew you were going to try and go there.

Fr. Andrew: Not Midgard, not Middengard.

Fr. Stephen: It’s not always the same podcast.

Fr. Andrew: It is being a different podcast. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So what this is saying—again, when you get a verse quoted, even if it’s just one verse being sung in liturgy, that’s supposed to call your mind back to the whole context. What that’s saying is that what happens on the cross, when Christ is crucified, is that second battle against Leviathan, in which Leviathan is defeated and the new creation begins. That’s why it’s quoted there.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so it’s not about a geographic location; it’s about the whole creation at once, that it affects everything. It’s about creation, not about a spot on a map.

Fr. Stephen: Right, yeah, and the crucifixion is not Christ temporarily losing but he’s going to have a comeback three days later…

Fr. Andrew: No. [Laughter] No, it’s—

Fr. Stephen: … The cross is splitting Yam in two and crushing the heads of Leviathan.

Fr. Andrew: It’s interesting to me that, if you understand the underworld, according to ancient myth, then there’s both this sense of a kind of cavern beneath the world, and then also a notion of plunging into the depths of the ocean. When we usually think of the harrowing of hell, then we… I don’t know. And frankly, most iconography depicts a kind of cavern. I have an awesome icon here in my studio thanks to some very generous people that depicts exactly this. Although it’s interesting: it’s kind of both, because you see the souls of the departed being swallowed up by what looks like a big serpent. But still, you’ve got that, and then also kind of cave. But then also, the underworld is understood as being underwater at the same time, so you get sort of the Jonah imagery of being down in the depths of the sea at the same time. So that’s kind of all going on at the same time here.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so those are the two sort of most interesting, perhaps, references that give us this picture of sort of the cosmic significance of Leviathan, but there are also some other appearances, and some of them have a little different character in the Old Testament. So there’s sort of a cursory mention in Amos 9:3, where it’s just—Leviathan is the serpent at the bottom of the sea.

Fr. Andrew: It’s going to bite people.

Fr. Stephen: I was trying to come up with something interesting to say about that, but that’s what it is.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, it just literally says in that verse: If you try to hide from the sight of God at the bottom of the sea, then the serpent is going to bite you. That’s basically what it says.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So the one we probably hear the most, again, if you go to vespers in an Orthodox church is—and I’m going to use the liturgical English Antiochian translation we’re probably used to hearing, so your experience may vary in translation—Psalm 104 (or 103 in the Greek numbering), that’s read at the beginning of vespers: “Leviathan, whom thou hast made to sport therein” is how it’s usually translated, referring to the sea. So you have the sea, and then God makes Leviathan to sort of flip around and play in the water is how it comes off. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right, you get this image like God made this beast: “Go play!” No—but that’s not what’s going on here.

Fr. Stephen: Because you can equally translate it: “Leviathan, whom thou hast made to play with him, to sport with him,” the idea being that God plays with Leviathan; Leviathan is like his pet, like his dog or like his cat, whom he plays with. Now that seems to be a striking contrast—

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yes!

Fr. Stephen: —with what we were just talking about with Leviathan.

Fr. Andrew: Right, but the way that these two things come together is this notion of almost domestication or muzzling or control, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and when we get into the last place where Leviathan is talked about, into Job, that kind of comes together. Job actually talks about Leviathan in two places. The first place is kind of a cursory reference again, and that’s in Job 3:8: it talks about “those skilled in raising up Leviathan,” which is kind of ominous.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah! I mean, it’s this whole sort of Cthulhu sort of thing.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, or “release the kraken.” So this is referring to sorcery; that is what it’s referring to, is magic, and not good magic, not friendly magic. And so the form that this seems—what this seems to be referring to directly is we have these things from ancient Israel and ancient Judah that are called incantation bowls. We have them from their neighbors, too. This is something they got from their neighbors; this isn’t something they were supposed to be doing. And they’re called incantation bowls because they’re sort of pottery bowls, and then around the—like in a circle around sometimes the outer ring, sometimes an inner ring, sometimes both if it’s a longer inscription, they’ll have these sort of spell-incantations.

Fr. Andrew: Now, would they kind of use this to mix up ingredients to make magical stuff, potions and such?

Fr. Stephen: It’s hard to tell.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because we just have the bowls.

Fr. Stephen: We know that in some cases, you could turn it and read it; we know in some cases where there were curses, they would read the curse and then smash it, the symbolism being kind of obvious if you’re putting a curse on somebody. And so the idea here is that raising up Leviathan is not getting your summoning circle and calling Cthulhu and Nyarlathotep into the world; the idea is that you’re sort of siccing Leviathan—you’re sending chaos and destruction after somebody in cursing them.

Fr. Andrew: It’s not a Christian thing to do.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, it’s a bad thing to do.

Fr. Andrew: Don’t do that.

Fr. Stephen: Don’t try this at home.

Fr. Andrew: Or anywhere!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah, definitely not at church! But sort of the main extended place where we hear about Leviathan in the book of Job runs from Job 40:25-41:26. Leviathan there is described in terms that are obviously reminiscent, in many places, of a crocodile. So you’ll get folks of a materialist bent, sort of often of a “we need to take everything literally” bent, who will try to say, “Oh, well, this passage in Job is just describing a crocodile, because crocodiles are big and scary lizards.”

Fr. Andrew: Right, but it’s a fire-breathing crocodile—and they don’t do that.

Fr. Stephen: That one’s hard to take literally, yeah. [Laughter] So you say, “I’m going to take it literally and say it’s a crocodile, but the fire-breathing part is figurative.” Good luck with that!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and this connects, then, with the idea that Leviathan can be a pet. How does that…? What’s going on there?

Fr. Stephen: The place where the crocodile is coming in is… We’ve seen, like with the Horus-Sobek imagery in Egypt, where this sort of chaos monster is depicted as a crocodile, that’s where crocodile elements are coming into Job’s description. But we also have, in early Iron Age Palestine, which would be the period of the Judges, roughly—we have these seals that show a humanoid figure—it’s just an image, so we don’t know if that’s supposed to be a god or whatever—who is controlling two crocodiles, has them on either leashes or hooks in their mouth or something. And in the academic world, this guy is called “the crocodile master.” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Which really sounds like a Golden Age DC hero.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, well, villain.

Fr. Andrew: Or villain, excuse me, right.

Fr. Stephen: A Batman villain: the Crocodile Master.

Fr. Andrew: It’s the Crocodile Master. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: But that’s just because we don’t know who he’s supposed to be.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s just what academics call him.

Fr. Stephen: But it’s a symbol of some being that has power or control over the forces of chaos and evil, is able to sort of dominate them and control them. So this is where this connects, then, to this idea of Leviathan, or Lu-yetan, being in some sense Yahweh the God of Israel’s pet or under his control.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right, and if this seems really too weird… [Laughter] I’ll just give an example from my own personal experience. Most people in our culture are familiar with people owning dogs, and dogs are pets, dogs are nice. And that’s why it horrifies us that people in the Far East like to eat them, like—[Gasp] Don’t eat them! But when I was quite young, I used to deliver newspapers on the island of Guam, and Guam has a lot of totally undeveloped jungle area, and in a lot of that undeveloped jungle area are the descendants, largely, of people’s pets, so there are wild dogs on Guam—at least there were when I lived there in the late ‘80s; I don’t know if that’s still the case. But there were wild dogs there, run in packs and do awful things, and I would encounter them sometimes when I was out there at four in the morning, delivering newspapers in my neighborhood. And, boy, are they— They look the same, basically, as the pets that people have in their houses, although they’re often mangy and gross, but they are—their personalities are vicious and chaotic and really destructive.

So the idea of taking a wild, vicious animal like that and controlling it and turning it into a different kind of thing, that’s a really great example of that. I mean, you don’t hardly ever run across a wild dog in the United States; you just run across people’s pets. But, boy, dogs on their own: they are chaos monsters, that’s for sure! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right, and this imagery is critically important to understanding how the Old Testament looks at what we today call the question of theodicy, and the relationship between God and the evil and chaos and destruction in the world. So in paganism, as we saw when we started talking about Leviathan, there’s this idea of equal opposition, that there are forces of order and forces of chaos, and they’re sort of continuously at war, and for now order has the upper hand, but that order is always threatened by chaos coming back in, and so there’s this constant vigilance. And usually—well, I shouldn’t say “usually”—often in these myth cycles, there’s some point in the future where chaos comes back and wins, some kind of Ragnarok.

Fr. Andrew: Ragnarok, exactly; that’s the one I was thinking of.

Fr. Stephen: That’s right. So there’s this kind of equal ultimacy of these two forces. You don’t have that in the Old Testament; you have something very different. There is nothing equal and opposite to Yahweh; everything that is, Yahweh created. And so that, then, is what creates the question of theodicy. You don’t have the question of theodicy where it’s just like: “Well, Re is doing the best he can. He’s fighting Apophis every bloody night. What do you want from him?” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right. You don’t ask, “Why does evil exist, Re?” It’s like, no.

Fr. Stephen: It’s obvious, right? He’s working; he’s sweating. So the picture we get—and we get this over and over again in different ways, and we’ll talk about this again when we cover other topics, because there are depictions of other—like, gods of plague and gods of trouble that are parallel to this and connected to the four horsemen of the apocalypse, for example, in the prophets—but what we see over and over again is this imagery of God having control over these things, in the sense that he can then use them. They are, in some sense, forced against their will to be his servants. We’ve talked about this with demons in general, this idea, this imagery, that’s made very explicit in the book of Jubilees, that God allows a certain number of demons a certain amount of leash in the world in order to torment the wicked, in order to bring them to repentance.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s the idea of the left hand of God.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and St. Paul picks up on that in talking about “turning someone over to Satan for the salvation of their soul through the destruction of their body.” That’s what he’s alluding to, is that understanding, that that’s why there are these troubles: to try to bring us to repentance, to try to bring us to salvation.

So God doesn’t just—Yahweh the God of Israel doesn’t just defeat chaos or hold chaos at bay, but he actually grabs ahold of chaos and uses even it to bring about order, to bring about good. He seizes the forces of evil and makes them bring about good, despite themselves.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he harnesses it.

Fr. Stephen: Right.

Fr. Andrew: All right, well, that is the first half of this episode, and we’re going to be right back after a short break.

Fr. Andrew: Welcome to the second half. Normally we would start taking your calls here, but, despite what the Voice of Steve just said, this is in fact a pre-recorded episode, so we’re not receiving any calls. Don’t call the number; no one’s home.

Fr. Stephen: Well, someone— What if they call it and someone does answer?

Fr. Andrew: Well, I… I’m not sure what would happen, actually. I don’t think anyone will be there. [Laughter] I don’t know.

Fr. Stephen: It’s a risk. You could roll the dice.

Fr. Andrew: It’s possible. I mean, it’s true: you could call. Hopefully, Trudi has taken the night off or something.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, maybe the call would end up coming from inside your own house.

Fr. Andrew: Dun-dun-dunn! That said, though, we did get this message from Chris.

Chris: Hi, Fathers. So my question is actually about the demonic beings of Leviathan and the Behemoth. I guess I’ve been thinking about it in relation to Christ putting all things under his feet, so my question has actually two parts. Do you think we could say that when Christ put all things under his feet, that he did in fact do the Mash—he did the Monster Mash? And, if so, do you actually think it was a graveyard smash? That’s it! Thank you.

Fr. Andrew: So, given everything we just said, I think the answer is pretty clearly yes, on both accounts. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: My answer is: Wah-waah.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Ba-dum-tssh! Thank you for that, Chris! It is a good observation you are making.

All right, so we’ve talked about Leviathan and being the monster mashed, and, indeed, it was a graveyard smash since it was about the destruction of Hades and so forth. So, okay, we’re also going to be talking about Behemoth. So what is…? What’s that all about? This is a very different kind of image.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Yeah, this is not just another name for the same thing. This is a whole separate tradition. And “Behemoth” is also, like “Leviathan” is a transliteration of Lu-yetan, “Behemoth” is a transliteration of Behemot, and behemot, unlike Lu-yetan, is a much more commonly used word, because behema, which is the noun in the singular, means “cow,” literally. And it was also sometimes used more generally just to mean “beast” as in “beasts of the field.” And so, yeah, that’s a relatively common word, and then, being a feminine—because it’s “cow”—being a feminine noun, grammatically feminine, the plural of that is behemot. So, yes, you heard that right. “Behemoth” is feminine plural. But there are places where this feminine plural noun takes masculine singular pronouns. That’s why we talk about Behemoth as a thing, as a creature.

Fr. Andrew: And not as things.

Fr. Stephen: Right, not as things. And so this plural is what we call an intensive plural.

Fr. Andrew: Right, so probably the first place people might go is to think: Okay, is this like the royal we, or as they call it the plural of majesty, which is… sort of a similar concept, but it’s not just a plural that refers to a singular thing. In that case, it’s a plural that refers to, you know, royalty, although you also have the editorial we—“As we have all seen…” But, yeah, it’s not the plural of majesty; it’s an intensive plural. It’s… Yeah. So what does that mean?

Fr. Stephen: This is really just a brief digression to respond to pedantry.

Fr. Andrew: Yes. [Laughter] We don’t have any pedants who listen to this podcast, though, I’m sure. None! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Not a one.

Fr. Andrew: Only the people who make it!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right! So, oftentimes we’re usually not talking about Behemoth when this comes up; we’re usually talking about the word Elohim, which is another plural that takes masculine singular pronouns in the Hebrew Old Testament.

Fr. Andrew: Sometimes.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, often. [Laughter] Because it’s being used to refer to God. It’s used to refer to Yahweh, but it’s in the plural. And so oftentimes the way that’s explained—some folks will try to bring the Trinity into that… There’s a way you could do that that’s semi-valid, but, frankly, no one is ever going to be convinced by it, because there’s another available option. And usually when that other option is being explained, usually people refer to the royal we that you were just referring to: “We are not amused.” [Laughter] And this idea that: “Oh, well, this is this royal thing being applied to God because he’s God.” And most times when that gets brought up, you will have someone show up and say, “Well, there’s not a plural of majesty in Hebrew.”

Fr. Andrew: Is that true?

Fr. Stephen: That is true!

Fr. Andrew: There it is!

Fr. Stephen: There is not, technically speaking… That is a correct “Um, actually… ‘technically’ ” but it’s being used for pedantry, because when people—giving them the benefit of the doubt: people who know what they’re talking about—when they use this example to explain to an English speaker why Elohim is plural, they’re using it as an analogy. So the plural of majesty in English is a structure like the intensive plural in Hebrew.

Fr. Andrew: But it’s not the same thing.

Fr. Stephen: Right. We don’t have an intensive plural in English.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I think the closest we get is—and this is purely colloquial, spoken English—is sometimes when we want— Sometimes we will repeat a word in order to achieve this same effect. So, like, I might—in this case, I might disambiguate between “I’m talking about a god” or “I’m talking about God God.” We sometimes do that, and there’s a lift that happens in pitch when you do the first one, and then, as a kind of modifier for the second. I think that’s the closest thing we have in English, but it only—I think it really only exists in spoken English; you don’t really see it written anywhere.

Fr. Stephen: Right. I mean, the closest thing in written English would be capitalizing things.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right.

Fr. Stephen: Turning it into a proper noun instead of a general noun. But so what actually is going on with the intensive plural in Hebrew is that—so for example with Elohim, this is God of gods; this is “God” with a capital-G; this is the great God; this is the God—

Fr. Andrew: Right, which is why in Greek you get O theos, the God.

Fr. Stephen: Right, you get the article added, to convey that same kind of idea. So that’s why it’s called the intensive plural: it intensifies the thing. So the same thing is happening with behemot. The reason it’s plural, even though it’s taking masculine singular pronouns, is that this is the Beast of beasts: this is the Beast, this is the great Beast. Hey, yeah, it’s the Super-Beast. [Laughter] This is the Beast. Capital-B.

Fr. Andrew: The Beast to end all beasts.

Fr. Stephen: Right. That’s the idea. That’s the idea, and that’s why Behemoth gets turned into a proper noun, transliterated into a proper noun, and capitalized, the way Leviathan is. So we don’t have the related cognate words, related to cattle, directly used to name Behemoth the way we have Lotan and Litanu and Lu-yetan, but we do have parallels outside of the Old Testament for this idea, that this is connected to. And probably the closest one—and I’ll just go ahead and say it now: We’re going to be speaking delicately throughout this half of the program about some things with Behemoth.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so: Parents, just be aware.

Fr. Stephen: We will be doing our best to speak delicately. Yeah. So the biggest and main parallel that we have from neighbors again comes out of the Ugaritic tradition, which shouldn’t be surprising: these are Israel’s neighbors, and Baal-worship is what keeps intruding into Israel throughout its history. So there is this figure, Bil-el-Atik [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Say that again? [Laughter] Sorry.

Fr. Stephen: You just like glottal stops. [Laughter] This is… And that, translated, is “El’s calf, Atik.”

Fr. Andrew: And El is Baal’s father.

Fr. Stephen: And so he has this calf named Atik, also sometimes called Arshu in the texts. And this is a sort of version of Baal. Elsewhere he’s sometimes referred to as bull-Baal or chthonic Baal that we mentioned before in terms of Set being assimilated into Set, in sort of later Egyptian understanding.

Fr. Andrew: Underworld-Baal, hellish Baal.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. And so we talked about how Leviathan is from the sea; this bull is seen as being sort of from the earth. And when we see that, we assume that means came up out of the ground, sort of, because the Hebrew word, haaretz, that usually gets translated “earth” is used a lot to refer to the underworld. This is what’s going on in Genesis 3 also, by the way, where the serpent is going to crawl along the “earth”: it’s talking about the underworld, being thrown down to the underworld, not being thrown down to the ground, but the underworld. And so that’s that chthonic element again.

And so bull-Baal is again that hypostasis idea: this is an aspect, this is a localization, an instantiation of Baal that’s associated with his power and particularly masculine power and virility—hence the delicacy in talking about some of this stuff. And so the primary sort of appearance of bull-Baal in myth is bull-Baal in the underworld, in which he three times engages with a heifer in Sheol, in the underworld, as a sort of bringing fertility out of death. This is a transition from winter to spring thing. And this was celebrated annually in Ugarit and in Phoenicia ritually with a fertility ritual that involved engaging—human priests engaging with cattle. That’s as delicate as I can do it. Let the listener understand, who’s an adult. [Laughter] Ain’t paganism beautiful?

And so this figure of bull-Baal, of Arshu, is described in another Ugaritic source in which the goddess Anat is speaking and bragging about all the cool stuff she’s done. She talks about having defeated the seven-headed dragon, the twisting serpent, Litanu, and having defeated Arshu. So in the pagan Ugaritic sources also, there’s sort of this parallel between Behemoth and Leviathan emerging. They’re not only drawn together, as we’re going to see in a minute, in the Old Testament.

We also see this kind of figure in the bull of heaven in the Epic of Gilgamesh, where you have this bull figure that is precious to the gods, and usually to a male god in particular, because it represents his virility and masculine power, his Austin Powers mojo, etc. [Laughter] And this even sort of makes an appearance with Zeus and Europa and that kind of thing, and also with the Minotaur in Greek stories, because, again, Greece is the last Ancient Near Eastern civilization and sort of brings some of these things into their final form.

So that brings us to, then, the Bible. And Behemoth shows up in the Bible less, at least directly, in the Old Testament, than Leviathan does. There are only two places, and the second place is a little contested, but I think I have a good argument for it. But the first place is uncontested, and the first place is in Job 40:15-24 in the Hebrew, 10-19 in the Greek. You may notice from that verse reference that that’s right before Leviathan is talked about, Behemoth is talked about. So they’re sort of brought together and paired here in the same way that they’re paired in the Ugaritic texts, these two figures.

Fr. Andrew: Okay. All right, so I’m going to read this from Job 40.

Behold, Behemoth, whom I made as I made you, he eats grass like an ox: behold, his strength is in his loins, and his power in the muscle of his stomach. He makes his tail stiff like a cedar; the sinews of his thighs are knit together. His bones are tubes of bronze, his limbs like bars of iron. He is the first of the works of God; let he who made him bring near his sword. For the mountains yield food for him, where all the wild beasts play. Under the lotus plants he lies, in the shelter of the reeds and in the marsh. For his shade, the lotus trees cover him; the willows of the brooks surround him. Behold, if the river is turbulent, he is not frightened; he is confident, though Jordan rushes against his mouth. Can someone take him by his eyes or pierce his nose to capture him?

And I’ll just say here, there’s a reference at the beginning to Behemoth’s power in terms of virility, so the bit about the “tail” is actually referring to something else, but that’s often just the way that some English translations treat it. So, again—

Fr. Stephen: Delicacy!

Fr. Andrew: Let the reader understand.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Right, and so here, just like there’s people who tried to do the crocodile thing, the materialist route, with Leviathan, there are people who try to say this is a hippo. [Laughter] That the Beast of beasts is a hippo. I don’t know that there are a lot of hippos in the Jordan. I don’t know that hippos are renowned for being really placid in rushing water. I don’t think either of things are true, frankly, but okay. [Laughter] Clearly not, right? So this is Behemoth, and we see there’s these images of virility, of power, but then also the marsh stuff, the river stuff, the Jordan stuff—this is associating him with—the word “river” there is literally nahar. Remember, in the Baal story, Yam’s sort of prince, his sort of right-hand man, is Nahar, river. And so this is connecting Behemoth again with Yam, with this chaos, these chaos forces, and that similar kind of idea. And so if we see Leviathan—as we’ve said this before on this show, but it’s worth saying again—if we see Leviathan as sort of toxic femininity, Behemoth is toxic masculinity, this sort of conquering—

Fr. Andrew: Tyrannical.

Fr. Stephen: —tyrannical force, yeah. And just as with Leviathan imagery going back to Sumer, if you set the WayBack Machine—go back to our first episode where we were talking about sacrifices in the Neolithic era: the bull decorations also go all the way back as far as we can tell in human civilization, with the same kind of connection with these forces.

The second place where I’m going to argue Behemoth shows up is in Isaiah 30:6-7.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, now is this the De Young Standard Translation?

Fr. Stephen: All of these translations are the De Young Standard Translation, yes. Any time you hear a translation on this show and you look it up somewhere and it doesn’t match, that’s because I’ve fiddled with it and corrected it. [Laughter] You may disagree with me and think I’ve butchered it, fair enough, but in my mind I’ve corrected it.

Fr. Andrew: It’s okay to disagree, everybody. It’s okay. Right, okay, so Isaiah 30:6-7:

An oracle against the behemoth of the south: Through a land of trouble and anguish, from whence come the lioness and the lion, the viper and the flying seraph, they carry their riches on the backs of donkeys and their treasures on the humps of camels, to a people that cannot profit them. Egypt’s help is worthless and empty; therefore I have called her Rahav, who sits still.

So what’s going on with that?

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] So the way this is typically translated in English is they’ll say it’s an oracle against the beasts of the Negev or the beasts of the desert.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the Negev, which is a particular desert, but it just means “south,” right?

Fr. Stephen: Right, negev is the word for “south”; that’s why they call that desert that: it was the desert to the south. Yeah, it’s the southern desert; that’s really what that means.

Fr. Andrew: Pretty uncreative name for the desert, but there it is.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right. And so what that would mean is, if you read verses one through five, they’re talking about Egypt, and verse seven again mentions Egypt. So it’s talking about the Assyrians are coming, they’re coming after Israel, and the temptation for Israel is going to be: “We need to go and make some treaty with Egypt, this other great power, earthly power, to defend us against the Assyrians. Forget the whole repenting and letting Yahweh protect us bit; we need to go and cut a deal with the Egyptians, because they have chariots.” And Yahweh, by means of Isaiah, is saying, “Uh-uh. That’s not going to work. That’s just going to bring about your destruction,” because, remember: “I delivered you out of Egypt. I defeated the Egyptian gods; there’s nothing for you there.” So that’s what he’s clearly—

Fr. Andrew: I was going to say, this is a theme in a lot of the Scriptures: “Revenge is mine, saith the Lord.” The whole king— We talked about this, when they talked about the kind of king they wanted in Saul, who was going to be a king to defeat their enemies and go make war the way they want to make war. Not trusting in God to do this, but instead building up an army and making treaties and functioning just like any of the nations around them do.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so that’s very clearly what one through five is about, Isaiah 30:1-5. So then, if we go by this other translation, then all of a sudden God decides to denounce animals that live in the desert.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I mean, ESV it’s called: “An oracle on the beasts of the Negev,” which just doesn’t make sense.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So why is God denouncing these animals? And then when we get the list of animals, we’ve got lioness and lion, okay; viper, okay, viper’s out in the desert; and then the way it’s usually translated is “flying, flaming serpents!”

Fr. Andrew: Right, which… that doesn’t sound natural. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so I translated that by just transliterating the word that’s there.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, “seraph”—

Fr. Stephen: Flying seraph.

Fr. Andrew: Right, because— So the reason why it makes sense to translate it that way and why that would be associated with Egypt is, first, this is the Egyptian term for these throne-guardians who are depicted in serpentine fashion, but, as I think we’ve mentioned on the podcast before, if you think about that headdress that pharaoh wears, it makes him look like a cobra, which—what is a cobra? It’s a snake with wings, so to speak. The sort of symbol of Egypt is this seraphic image.

Fr. Stephen: Right. This is… Look at the sphinx: it’s a lion. So we’ve got lions and serpents. These are the symbols of Egyptian power, and that’s what it’s referring to. Because it’s hard to imagine a bunch of lions and lionesses and snakes—even flying, flaming snakes [Laughter]—carrying their riches on donkeys and camels. So literally the normal translation of this makes no sense.

Fr. Andrew: I mean, this would make a great Rudyard Kipling story. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right. If you translate verse six the way I did, “An oracle against the behemoth of the south,” calling Egypt “the behemoth of the south”—

Fr. Andrew: The tyrant, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Associating Egypt with Behemoth, and this is about a seraph—this is a symbol of their power. They, the Egyptians, put their riches on the backs of donkeys and their treasures on the humps of camels when they’re doing trade, to a people that cannot profit them, so their efforts are futile. Their trade efforts are futile, and then, lo and behold in verse seven, it then makes sense to say: “Egypt’s help is worthless and empty. Therefore I have called it Rahav”—and now we refer to Rahav; we refer to this sea-monster, this other chaos monster.

Fr. Andrew: Who sits still, which is the opposite of its power.

Fr. Stephen: Right, who is inactive. It may seem like this powerful beast, but they’re not doing anything. So this is the other thing. And we see here—what’s important about this one, the reason we spent all this time with me quibbling about the translation and being a pedant myself, is that this shows us, in the same way we saw Leviathan kind of lurking behind and animating the enemies of God, this is shows us Behemoth—Rahav also, but Behemoth—lurking behind and animating these nations, these enemies of God. And that’s going to be really important when we get to the third half.

Fr. Andrew: Which shows, then, why Israel wanting to deal with Egypt by what we might think of as conventional military and diplomatic means—why that’s a futile act on their part, because: No, no, no, this is actually a spiritual conflict. You must have God on your side; you can’t just go off and do this on your own. One does not simply walk into Cairo. Sorry. Or Alexandria. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Cairo!? Wow.

Fr. Andrew: Sorry. Excuse me! I was being a little anachronistic there. Excuse me.

Fr. Stephen: Even Alexandria is anachronistic. This is Isaiah, bro. This is eighth century BC.

Fr. Andrew: So what’s the capital?

Fr. Stephen: Memphis! Memphis, my friend.

Fr. Andrew: I’m sorry.

Fr. Stephen: Okay. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Well, look, the Bible can be anachronistic! It can refer to Babylon when Babylon is nowhere nearby, so.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, okay, okay. Nice try. [Laughter] Um, actually…

Fr. Andrew: Thank you!

Fr. Stephen: And now to sort of round this out to catch us up to… Because when we come to the third half, we’re going to move to the New Testament… We’ve got a lot of interesting reactions, shall we say, to the title of this episode when it was pronounced.

Fr. Andrew: Yes! “Leviathan: It’s What’s for Dinner.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and this idea of chowing down on Leviathan. And actually we’re talking about chowing down on Leviathan and Behemoth, so it’s dinner time with both of them. That dad joke is beneath me, so you’re going to have to make it.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yes. Fr. Stephen is reading from the script right now. Yes, it’s the surf-and-turf. You’re welcome.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. [Laughter] What’s going to happen is that, as we move through Second Temple Judaism and into early Christianity, there’s one more sort of piece to the puzzle in terms of how the traditions surrounding Behemoth and Leviathan are going to develop, and that piece comes in Ezekiel, which is also obviously exilic, written in the Babylonian exile: Ezekiel 39:17-20, and this is describing the fate of Gog and Magog, these nations that are the enemies of God and we now know who’s animating them from the other texts.

Fr. Andrew: Right. Okay, so this is Ezekiel 39:17-20.

As for you, Son of Man, thus says the Yahweh-God: Speak to the birds of all kinds and to all of the beasts of the field. Assemble and come; gather from all around to the sacrificial feast that I am preparing for you, a great sacrificial feast on the mountains of Israel. And you will eat flesh and drink blood; you will eat the flesh of the mighty and drink the blood of the princes of the earth, of rams, of lambs, and of goats, of bulls, all of them fat beasts of Bashan. And you will eat the fat until you are full and drink blood until you are drunk at the sacrificial feast that I am preparing for you. And you will be filled at my table with horses and charioteers, with mighty men and all kinds of warriors, declares Yahweh-God.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and notice that—hopefully, by now, people notice that reference to Bashan, home of Og, home of the dead Rephaim, home of Mount Hermon, gateway to the underworld. Again, we have that imagery that we saw with Leviathan in the psalm at the creation, of giving as food to the creation, the carcasses and blood of the defeated enemies of God, and that’s sort of the prophecy of the fate of these enemies. And so when we get into that Second Temple Jewish literature and early Christian literature, in 1 Enoch 60:7-9, there’s this reference to Behemoth and Leviathan: Leviathan as a female figure, Behemot as a male figure, despite language gender being opposite, and Leviathan is in the abyss, the tehom that we saw was connected to Tiamat, and Behemoth is in the desert of [Duidain], which is not a Tolkien place, even though it sounds like one.

Fr. Andrew: Not Dúnedain. That’s not a place; the Dúnedain are a people. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: But the importance of that desert is that desert is said to be “east of Eden.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s the Cain homeland, where he builds his city, the Cain civilization.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so that Behemoth and bull imagery is associated with the cities. So you have chaos in the abyss and you have this chaos and oppression in the cities motivating these nations. And then in 4 Ezra—and again, you should read 4 Ezra—

Fr. Andrew: Everybody.

Fr. Stephen: If you’re in a Slavic Orthodox tradition, it’s in your Bible—4 Ezra 6:49-52 describes that Leviathan and Behemoth were created on the fifth day and were separated. Behemoth was put on the land, on the earth, and Leviathan was put in the sea until the end times, when they come forth to be eaten.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right. It’s what’s for dinner!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] And then 2 Baruch, sometimes called the second apocalypse of Baruch, 29:4, in its description of the messianic age, the age when the Messiah reigns, Leviathan and Behemoth get eaten by the remnant, the remnant who has been purified by judgment. Leviathan and Behemoth emerge, and they get eaten by them.

And then finally you get a similar kind of imagery in the Apocalypse of Abraham 21:4; this is just about Leviathan, but Leviathan is sort of lurking in the sea behind the scenes, like behind current events, until the end times when it emerges.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so the point being that all of this imagery that’s in the Old Testament that we also find in a lot of pagan sources as well, continues on into the Second Temple period, and there’s this remarkable similarity with what’s said, the notion that Leviathan and Behemoth are these demonic forces at work in the world, Leviathan associated with chaos, Behemoth with sort of tyranny, and they’re kind of underneath everything; there’s a sort of primal sensibility to them, versus a lot of the kind of demonic beings that are described as going from one place to another and that kind of thing. And that they’re going to be eaten at the end of time, and, in the case of 2 Baruch, the notion that they’re going to be eaten specifically by the remnant who have been faithful to God.

It’s really interesting how everything… There is this sense that all of these source are functioning within the same world. They’re not cribbing notes from each other; it’s just: this is the tradition that people believe in. I mean, there’s different takes, pagan versus Israelite, but the basic kind of facts are essentially the same.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and this is bringing us up—I mean right up—to the period of the New Testament being written, where all of this is kind of going to come to a final flower in terms of the Christian appropriation of it.

Fr. Andrew: All right. And we will talk about that in the third half, and so right now we’re going ahead and take our second break. We’ll be right back.

Fr. Andrew: Welcome to the third half. Again, just a quick reminder—we do love you, Voice of Steve, but your own pre-recorded voice does not know that this is a pre-recorded episode, so we’re not taking any calls. But, that said, we did get this message from Nathan.

Nathan Hargrave: This is Nathan Hargrave calling from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and my question is in regards to the beast out of the sea and the beast out of the earth referenced in the book of Revelation. In growing up in the Protestant world, I was commonly taught that the beast out of the sea was identified as the Antichrist, and that the beast out of the earth was identified as the false prophet. However, in reading the book of Revelation, along with studying Fr. Stephen De Young’s blog and listening to this podcast, it seems to me that, given what we see in our world today in the deification of American civil religion in particular and liberal democracy in general around the world, that the beast out of the sea is rather a world system that is anti-Christ but not necessarily an individual or a person; and that the beast out of the earth is in fact what we would call an Antichrist or the world or the devil’s replacement of Christ in the form of a goat. I would be curious to hear your perspective on this, given the fact that we do see this proliferation of liberal democracy around the world and we see its ultimate bankruptcy in the liberal teachings that are proliferated with it. Thank you.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so a lot going on there. We are going to talk about the beasts out of the sea and out of the earth here in the third half, so this is kind of what we’re doing.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and I think, just to clarify, because especially the way political words are used and even the way politics is used in the United States today, everything’s super ambiguous because everybody uses words different ways, I’m going to interpret what he’s talking about with liberal democracy and liberal teachings to refer to sort of the whole liberal tradition, like John Locke and on, the modern political idea of liberal democracy, not like “liberals” the way they’re talked about in American politics. So from that perspective, pretty much all of American—just about all of American politics, even on the fringes, is on the liberal democracy category, and Western Europe.

Fr. Andrew: We don’t have hereditary absolute monarchy.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right, for example.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so to understand the beasts out of the sea and the earth, we have to go back to Daniel first, right?

Fr. Stephen: Right. That’s really the topic of this whole episode, is the beasts out of the land and the sea, so of course we’re going to talk about it at the very end of the episode, as is our wont. [Laughter] So we need to pick up—the first place where beasts like this appear is in Daniel 7. We’ve talked about Daniel 7 a couple of times before, but in those couple of times we’ve talked about it, we’ve focused on mainly verses 9-14, which is the enthronement of the Son of Man with the Ancient of Days; we’ve talked a lot about that.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, on our Ascension episode particularly we focused on that.

Fr. Stephen: And this is the rest of that chapter, so verses 1-8 and verses 15-28, which deal with some beasts. So this is what’s before the enthronement of the Son of Man, and afterwards the interpretation of that vision, which culminates with that enthronement. So what we get in Daniel 7:1-8 is this vision that Daniel has of these four beasts, all of whom come up out of the sea. So if everybody is paying attention in the first two halves before we come to our third half, they know that as soon as you hear “beast from the sea,” you should be thinking Leviathan.

Fr. Andrew: Right.

Fr. Stephen: But we have this succession. The four don’t come out all at once; they come out one at a time. And so each of these is going to be connected in some way to Leviathan. The first one of these… Well, we’ll go ahead and say, as we already saw Leviathan as a motivating spirit sort of lies behind these national enemies, these armies, etc., that are opposed to Yahweh the God of Israel and the people of Israel, and so that’s very much what’s happening here. So these are sort of monsters that are emerging as sort of instantiations of Leviathan, particular instantiations of Leviathan. There’s a connection here—I don’t want to go down this rabbit-trail, but just to let people know I’m aware of it, just because we don’t want this episode to be five hours long—I know there’s a connection here to Typhon and Gaia and the Titans, but we’re not going to go down that road right now; maybe at a later point. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: I’m interested already. I don’t know what this is yet. Sorry, everybody. It’ll have to be another time.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] So the first one that emerges is this lion with wings.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, a cherub. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right, and this may particularly, if you’re familiar with Babylonian sort of iconography etc.—and Assyrian, too, for that matter, but Babylonian—you’ve seen those things that look kind of like a sphinx—it’s got a lion body and wings, and then it’s got a human head.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, with usually some kind of a crown, a kind of more vertical sort of crown than the Egyptian version, which has the sort of pharaonic sort of headdress on it.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and it’s got sort of the—instead of the tacked-on pharaoh beard, which was a fake beard, it’s got sort of the great big curly ringlet beard, the Babylonian. [Laughter] And so when we read about a winged lion that’s given the mind of a man, we can pretty clearly see this is referring to Babylon and the Babylonian Empire, under whose dominion Daniel was living in exile. So this first sort of instantiation of Leviathan is the Babylonian empire.

Then the next beast that comes out of the sea is this bear that’s sort of listing or limping to one side, who has three ribs in his mouth. And this is a depiction that’s referencing the Persian Empire.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, why it is limping? What’s that all about?

Fr. Stephen: Because it’s technically the Medo-Persian Empire, and the Medes were sort of the junior partners.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, okay.

Fr. Stephen: And you’ve got the ribs: the Medes were getting thrown a bone.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] So you’re willing to make that dad joke, but not the serpents joke.

Fr. Stephen: I’m willing to do that.

Fr. Andrew: Man! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: I draw the line somewhere; maybe not where anyone else would, but somewhere.

And then the third beast that emerges is described as a leopard who has four wings and four heads, and the leopard is a reference to Alexander the Great.

Fr. Andrew: So Greece.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and then after Alexander’s death, you end up with the four kingdoms; the Diadochi successors formed the four sort of states when they carve up what was his empire.

And then finally the fourth beast emerges. This beast isn’t described like being any animal; it’s just sort of terrible and horrible and has iron teeth and ten horns, and there’s three more horns, and then those horns get cut off, and there’s a little horn, and the little horn is talking trash.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That’s just eerie and weird! I mean, not that it’s all not weird, but you know what I’m saying. This little horn, I think it’s described as having the face of a man or something like that.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, the horn does; the horn has eyes and a mouth.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: So the horns are kings. The little horn is sort of this one king in particular, who is particularly blasphemous and evil. Now, you may be wondering: Am I just pulling a Jack Van Impe here and saying, “Well, this represents this; this represents that.” So this is really secure that this is what it’s talking about. This is in parallel to the other vision that Daniel has, where he sees the statue made of the different metals that points to the same four empires; with bronze and iron there’s even some of the same imagery. And this is so obvious and so clear that this vision is why a whole host of modern secular scholars don’t believe Daniel could have been written during Daniel’s lifetime, because of course they don’t believe in actual prophecy, so there’s no way he could have been this spot-on! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s sort of so on-the-nose that, yeah… It’s not vague enough for “real” prophecy.

Fr. Stephen: Right, for them to buy it.

Fr. Andrew: Interesting.

Fr. Stephen: So that’s how secure it is. That’s how clear it is that this is what it’s talking about. And so the enthronement of the Son of Man, then, that we’ve talked about before, that part of the vision in 9-14, accompanies this final beast with the horn talking trash gets defeated and killed, and we’re told that the dominion is taken away from the beasts and given to the Son of Man, but they continue to live for a long time. They’re sort of still around.

Fr. Andrew: Right. An interesting, useful point.

Fr. Stephen: And the mark of this horn is that is sort of makes war against the holy ones. And that’s usually translated as “saints” here, which is a valid translation of “holy ones,” but usually one we associate with the New Testament and can give the wrong idea. We think the saints: “Oh, it’s talking about persecuting Christians.” Well, this is the book of Daniel. So this is primarily talking about that there is this—what they’re seeing is this persecution by empires: the Babylonian Empire persecuting Daniel and his friends, that we see throughout the book of Daniel; and then the Persians, also in the book of Daniel; and then the Greeks that we see in 1 and 2 Maccabees; and then the Romans. So that’s the sort of visible, material part is this is persecution, but what lies behind that is this spiritual warfare.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, this concept of “in heaven as on earth,” or you could put it the other way: “on earth as in heaven.” That there is a war going on on all levels of the creation, both the material, visible and the invisible, heavenly reality at the same time.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And sort of at the culmination of the interpretation, talking about the Son of Man, just to add to this, in verse 27, it says that “his kingdom shall be an everlasting kingdom and all dominions shall serve and obey him,” “dominions” being sort of beings; that’s that rank of angels who have authority over the nations. So the dominions, the spirits behind these powers ultimately, are going to have to submit to Christ as well, at the end of the long time.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and this is the exact theme that the Lord is referencing right before the Ascension. “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations.”

Fr. Stephen: Right. Rome didn’t suddenly disappear and stop persecuting Christians.

Fr. Andrew: Right! There’s Christ is ruling in the midst of his enemies. I had someone actually ask me recently; they’re like: “How can you say that Christ has defeated the demons when things are as bad as they are right now?” And it’s like: Well, if you understand what the pagan world was like, and then how the whole world changed with the coming of Christ, then you begin to see that what we’re looking at is no longer demons in charge; rather, this is demons on the run, and they’re looting and burning as they go. They don’t run things any more the way that they once did, but they’re still causing a lot of trouble as they’re being routed.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So, all of that set up, now we can finally get to Revelation 13 and these two beasts. [Laughter] And these two beasts emerge in Revelation 13, and both of them are said to have the power—we’ve already seen the dragon in chapter 12 (the devil)—and these two beasts whom we see emerge in chapter 13 have the power of the dragon. And if we’re talking about the power of the devil, according to St. Paul’s epistle to the Hebrews, that’s death. Violence, death: we see this again, this chaos idea. So these beasts: one beast emerges from the sea, and one from the earth, from the haaretz, from the underworld.

It’s very clear, now that we’ve read these things, if you read the Second Temple, early Christian literature leading up to this, this is Leviathan from the sea and Behemoth; this is not now a representative of them, but this is them. And so they’re sort of the paradigmatic beasts. These are the forces that animate the various instantiations, the various aspects that we see in the material world. This is now exposing… Remember, that’s what’s being revealed. “Apocalypse,” “revelation”: this is what’s being revealed.

Fr. Andrew: The demons behind the curtain, so to speak, are now stepping out.

Fr. Stephen: Right. We’re going to reveal what’s behind these things you’re seeing and experiencing in the material world, the spiritual reality behind it.

This is important because, just like there’s a tendency to play pin-the-tail-on-the-Antichrist…

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Someone out there is creating a game right now called “Pin the Tail on the Antichrist” and is going to be sending it to us.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yes, and they’ll have photos of various figures in world history: Napoleon; Hitler; Juan Carlos, King of Spain—pick one.

So that when we see these beasts again—we just saw these beasts in Daniel were referring to these specific empires that emerged in sequence; he was kind of giving us… Daniel—this is one of several places where the book of Daniel and its visions gives us the timeline of when the Messiah is going to be born. And people had figured that out in the first century; that’s why there were so many people showing up in the first century claiming to be the Messiah, not just the actual Messiah, but fake ones, because—

Fr. Andrew: Because Rome was on the scene.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and they’re reading the book of Daniel and going: “Oh! Yeah, now’s the time when this is supposed to happen.” So people, being a little narcissistic, managed to convince themselves that they were it. [Laughter] There’s been a tendency, then, to apply that same kind of reading to what we get in Revelation 13, to treat this not as being the revelation of the power behind all of it throughout history but to view it as being a particular one.

Fr. Andrew: I see, I see: the story continues, you know.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so amongst our Protestant friends, for example, you have people who are preterists, who want to say that all of this prophecy has already been fulfilled, or at least most of it, and they will say, “Well, okay, these beasts are talking about the Roman Empire. It’s a specific empire; it’s the Roman Empire: that’s in the past.” Then, conversely, amongst our Protestant friends, particularly of people who are of a pre-millennial bent, but even some who are of an a-millennial or other bent in terms of how they see the end times, they will see this as: This is talking about some particular future kind of empire or oppressor or system.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I remember growing up in the 1980s growing up in churches that were very much of that kind. Often it was taken from just the future to now. In other words: this is about—the big one at the time was the Soviet Union—this is about the Soviet Union, which means that the end of the world is coming, like, any day now.

Fr. Stephen: Right, yeah. This is some future thing—and now here it is! Pin the tail on the Antichrist.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and America, in particular, has this millenarianism in its soup, in its religious soup. People have been looking for the end of the world over and over again, and I think this is one of the things why a lot of people get super, super anxious about it when they see bad things happening in the world; it’s like: This is the end; this is the precursor to that, or: This has arrived. There’s this sense… Often I think not really realizing what’s actually going on in these scriptural passages. The answer to the question, “Are we living in the end times?” is “Yes, and we’ve been living in the end times for 2,000 years at least.” This is still “these last days.” Are these the last last, last “last days”? I don’t know about that. We don’t know.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right, we don’t know. And this goes back further. It’s not just the US.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, oh sure.

Fr. Stephen: This starts around 1000 AD, because there were people looking at Revelation 20, and: “Oh! This period where Christ reigns in the midst of his enemies is going to last a thousand years. Well, we must be about on it! It’s 1000 AD.”

Fr. Andrew: And that’s not to make light of evil things happening in the world, but just to say that the sort of prophetic narrative that sometimes is pushed is a bit of a stretch in terms of what the Scripture actually is saying.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so there was medieval apocalypticism surrounding the Crusades; you see it in the Reformation, tons of it; you see it with Jonathan Edwards; you see it with Sir Isaac Newton…

Fr. Andrew: World War I.

Fr. Stephen: This is just a thing! Napoleon… Yeah, and what we’re going to see, though, as now we get into the text, is that, again, this is talking about the animating spirits themselves. These are the paradigmatic beasts that lie behind not one of those but all of those. So in one way, I’m not saying all those people were wrong; in one way, I’m saying they were all right.

Fr. Andrew: Just not in the way they think. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right, just not in the way they think. That there is this force behind all of that. And so when they look at something in their world happening, and they point to that to say: See a connection with these beasts in Revelation, there is a connection, but it’s not that that’s making a prediction and now that prediction is happening in front of you. That’s the extra step. So we see that right away when we get into the beast from the sea and the way he’s described in Revelation 13, because we’re told he has seven heads; that’s Leviathan. Leviathan is the seven-headed serpent, and he’s coming out of the sea. And that there are ten horns on each head; those ten horns, remember the fourth beast?

Fr. Andrew: In Daniel.

Fr. Stephen: In Daniel, had the ten horns. And then when you look at the description of him, he’s got leopard parts and bear parts and lion parts. And this isn’t saying he’s ManBearPig; this is—he’s a combination of all four beasts in Daniel—and Leviathan.

And there are on the heads these blasphemous names and titles. This is a reference to a phenomenon that happened in the Roman Empire, but not just in the Roman Empire; this happened in pretty much all of the empires from Daniel and going forward, where the individual emperor, the ruler, would take to himself these titles. So you look at the Seleucid monarchs who ruled over the area that included Palestine, included Judea. You have Antiochus “Soter”: the savior; you have Antiochus IV “Epiphanes”: the manifestation of a god.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, or, I mean, Augustus called himself “savior of the world.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, “savior of the world,” “son of god,” “the lord”: these are all titles that these emperors took, and we’re going to talk more about that in a little bit, but we see this is bundling all of this together. This isn’t talking about one in particular; we’re bundling it all together. It even refers to the fact that what this represents, this spirit, this force, is being worshiped over against not just God himself, but it’s set up against the divine council: the kingdom and the dominion of God on earth.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, in Revelation 13, it says, “This beast had opened its mouth to utter blasphemies against God, blaspheming his name and his dwelling, that is, those who dwell in heaven. Also it was allowed to make war on the saints and to conquer them.” So there’s this kingdom against the kingdom of God, and all the holy ones who are dwelling within it.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and notice also, though, that language: “It was allowed.” [Laughter] So even as terrible as this behavior is, it’s on a leash; Leviathan’s still on a leash.

And this idea of this kind of animating spirit, that starts all the way back with Cain building that first city and goes to the Tower of Babel and goes through all these human empires, this is sort of the core insight of what St. Augustine picks up on in City of God when he talks about the City of God over against the City of Man. That the City of Man starts with Cain building that city. And it’s worth noting that St. Augustine saw even the Christian Roman Empire that was collapsing in the West around him as part of the City of Man, that this is a separate thing.

So then that brings us to the beast from the earth. So then we have this second beast, the beast from the earth, in Revelation 13. And it’s described as having horns like a lamb but speaking like the dragon. [Laughter] So this is, as our caller pointed out, an Antichrist depiction: It looks like a lamb—

Fr. Andrew: Looks like the Messiah, but talks like the devil.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right, but it’s speaking the devil’s words, not God’s. Remember, St. John wrote Revelation. Remember what St. John says over and over again in his gospel: Christ says, “I speak the words of my Father who is in heaven. I do the works of my Father who is in heaven.” So this guy may look like a lamb, but he’s speaking the words and doing the words of his father who is the devil in this case, this figure. And what he does is he gets people to worship the beast from the sea, and, through the beast from the sea, the dragon, the devil, ultimately, himself. So this is a religious leader and a religious system that is then tied to and a function of this sort of world system that is animated by the first beast.

Fr. Andrew: Mmm. So it’s essentially a kind of state religion, that’s state Satanism, so to speak.

Fr. Stephen: Right, of a civil religion, which does not appear to be Satanism.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right, it appears to be something else.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah, it appears to be something else.

Fr. Andrew: And it looks like a lamb.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so these are these two beasts, Behemoth and Leviathan, and how these two spirits are functioning, how they’re revealed to be functioning behind the scenes, not just in St. John’s day, he’s making clear, but before that and after that until the end. And then, in Revelation 19:17-21, St. John describes what happens to these beasts at the end, and, spoiler alert, it’s going to be a beast-feast.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yes, yes. So, okay, here’s Revelation 19:17-21.

Then I saw an angel standing in the sun, and with a loud voice he called to all the birds that fly directly overhead, “Come, gather for the great supper of God, to eat the flesh of kings, the flesh of captains, the flesh of mighty men, the flesh of horses and their riders, and the flesh of all men, both free and slave, both small and great.” And I saw the beast, and the kings of the earth, with their armies gathered to make war against him who was sitting on the horse, and against his army. And the beast was captured, and with it the false prophet who in its presence had done the signs by which he deceived those who had received the mark of the beast and those who worshiped its image. These two were thrown alive into the lake of fire that burns with sulfur, and the rest were slain with the sword that came from the mouth of him who was sitting on the horse, and all the birds were gorged with their flesh.

So I mean, this is the same scene out of Ezekiel 39, right?

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so those forces of chaos and evil and destruction are turned into nourishment for the creation. It’s not just order defeats chaos; it’s God brings order out of chaos, good out of evil, life out of death in this imagery. And so, to narrow our focus down a little, because we talked about this being—there’s clearly symbolism about Rome here, so this is clearly the spirit—the beast from the sea is clearly the spirit animating Rome; the beast from the earth is clearly animating Roman religion, because people literally worshiped Rome and worshiped the emperor—but there’s also this particular Antichrist element. And just like there is a particular reference in St. John’s day for empire, there’s a particular reference in St. John’s day for who the emperor is, who was also the pontifex maximus, who was also the high priest of the Roman religion.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and that was Nero.

Fr. Stephen: That’s Nero, yes. So, just like we talked about with the empires, the same thing applies to the Antichrist. In fact, if you go to 1 John—again, written by the same author—St. John says, “Again, you have heard that an antichrist will come, and already antichrists”—plural—“have arisen. So he’s not denying that there will be one final Antichrist, just like there will be one final empire, because Christ is going to return, and there will be one, presumably, at that point, and that’ll be the last one. [Laughter] But that doesn’t mean that it’s just this figure in the future.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, this is a really important point. A lot of times when we’re playing pin-the-tail-on-the-Antichrist, we ignore the fact that it’s plural, that there’s been a bunch, and then we can become—even if you recognize that, then you might become obsessed: “Well, okay, is this the final one?” And the truth is, it’s sort of antichrists and empires all the way down. This force keeps animating things all the way down. It’s always with us; it’s always going to be the context in which the people of God are called to be faithful.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so, again, somebody wants to say Napoleon was an antichrist—okay, sure. Hitler, Stalin—sure, yeah, let in… Yeah. Mao—yeah. It’s not just a question of finding this one person; this is—we’re having a type revealed to us, and Nero is sort of emblematic for this for St. John’s day. He’s the one who’s sort of in front of St. John. And the particular element that sort of—there are a few elements that cement this: two main ones and then a secondary one. The first main one is this imagery of the beast having this wound that was healed, this mortal wound that was healed. And this is a connection to what’s come down to us, named the Nero Redivivus myth.

Fr. Andrew: Which just means…

Fr. Stephen: Nero, come back to life.

Fr. Andrew: Alive again, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: So Nero, of course, committed suicide back in the, I believe 68, AD 68, and I won’t get into all the current scholarly arguments about the fire and everything. But anyway, Nero died by suicide, but almost immediately there were rumors and this kind of thing that he wasn’t really dead, that he had faked the suicide or he was injured but not really dead, and he’d gone off to Asia Minor. Not coincidentally this is where St. John is writing to: the seven churches he addresses Revelation to are all in Asia Minor, in the place where folks thought Nero might be hiding out to come back.

According to St. Irenaeus of Lyons, whom I have no reason as a Church Father to doubt on this, since he was the spiritual grandson of St. John, St. John’s Revelation, he had his vision circa AD 95, second year of Domitian. So we have evidence from before that of the existence of this belief, and one of the primary places we have that is in Dio Chrysostom—no relation to St. John, because that’s not a last name.

Fr. Andrew: That just means “golden-mouth,” “good speaker.”

Fr. Stephen: It’s a title for somebody who is good with rhetoric. But Dio Chrysostom, who’s a Roman pagan, his Discourse XXI on beauty—and it was written circa AD 88, so seven years before St. John had his vision—he talks there about this hope that Nero would return and sort of return the empire to its glory days. We have in the Sibylline Oracles IV and V, Tacitus’s Histories 2.8, and Suetonius 57—they all talk about, in later Roman history, pseudo-Neros, people who show up in Rome or other major Roman cities, claiming to be Nero back from the dead, to try to get a throne or get a following or start a revolution. So this was ingrained enough in people that you could try to pull that. [Laughter] This sort of story was firmly embedded.

And this lasts all the way up to St. Augustine in The City of God that we mentioned earlier, in XX.19.3; so this is the fifth century in North Africa, the Western Roman Empire, the Christian Roman Empire, as the western part is collapsing. He tells us that at that time there were pagans who were going around holding out hope, saying that Nero would return and save the Western Empire; and there were Christians who also believed it. There were Christians who said Nero’s going to come back and he’s going to be the Antichrist; he’s going to be the final Antichrist. So they were doing that even in the fifth century. So that’s how embedded this was: Nero as sort of this prototypical antichrist figure, and Nero—the relationship between Nero and this figure in Revelation 13 is just embedded in Roman Christianity, not just here.

But again, Nero is the type of this, not—it’s not saying, “Oh, Nero was it, so don’t worry about that whole Antichrist thing any more.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he’s not the one and only.

Fr. Stephen: Sorry, preterists! [Laughter] So this is this kind of secondary argument. I don’t want to go down this rabbit-hole; I think it’s kind of a weak argument, frankly, but in Revelation 17:10-11, there’s these seven kings, and people try to link them up to the first seven Roman emperors. There’s some shenanigans there; I don’t think we need to try and do that. But, more importantly, we get the mark of the beast’s name at the end of chapter 13, which is either the 666 that everybody’s familiar with, or, in the oldest manuscripts we have of Revelation, 616. And that’s not a contradiction or a problem, because if you do what’s called gematria…

Fr. Andrew: What’s gematria, Fr. Stephen? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: I know that… Well, I’ll explain this to Fr. Andrew—

Fr. Andrew: Thank you.

Fr. Stephen: I know most of our listeners engage in gematria on an almost daily basis. Gematria was a way of… Well, in Hebrew, they didn’t have numerals; or Greek, for that matter.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, they just used letters.

Fr. Stephen: Right, they just used letters. And so that lends itself to a system in which you can kind of swap out letters for numbers and then add them up and do things both to put things in code or to do esoteric stuff with the text of the Bible, sort of quasi-numerological, magical stuff, but also just simple encoding. So the language in Revelation 13 surrounding this number, that this number is the name of a man… I mean, St. John is very deliberately going: “Let the reader understand…” [Laughter] Like: “You know what I’m saying without saying it.”

Fr. Andrew: Nudge, nudge, wink, wink; say no more!

Fr. Stephen: Right. So in order to do gematria with a name or a word or a sentence, in a language other than Hebrew, you have to transliterate it into Hebrew, because it’s all about Hebrew letters and numbers. And so if you take Nero’s title in Greek, Neron Kaisar—and of course, since we’re doing Hebrew, you just have the consonants—and you add that up, you get 666. If you take his title in Latin, and transliterate it into Hebrew, you get Nero Caesar, which adds up to 616. So they’re both encoding the same thing, using the same message; it’s just which source language they’re going into Hebrew from.

Fr. Andrew: Right, so this is St. John saying, “The emblematic person I’m talking about is Nero.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, but again, this is emblematic. So, yes, I know “Ronald Wilson Reagan”: there are six letters in each name…

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Oh man!

Fr. Stephen: …but he was not the Antichrist. I’m going to go out on a limb here! At least not the final one. [Laughter] There’s some people in South America who might think he was one of them, but he was not— This is not what this is going for.

So where does this bring us? Well, we’re talking about these spiritual forces, Behemoth and Leviathan, and the way they express themselves in our world is by being the spirits that lie behind empire, that lie behind this whole concept of empire. And there’s a fundamental difference between the idea of a tribe or a nation or a people or a cultural group—and an empire.

Fr. Andrew: Yes. Yeah, the first is an actual shared life, based in the earliest stages on families; but empire is about taking your values, ideology, way of life on the road and making other people follow it.

Fr. Stephen: Right, through violence and death and the power of the dragon.

Fr. Andrew: Right, exactly. It’s totalitarian; it’s expansive; it’s aggressive; it’s conquering—which is the opposite of the Gospel, which is a universal way of life, but it’s spread not through force but through persuasion, and through martyrdom, frankly.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and it takes these different forms as the Gospel comes to these different tribes and nations and peoples. It doesn’t come and dominate them and seek to eradicate them as entities.

Fr. Andrew: Erase, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: And so this also always—I mean, in the ancient world, there’s no separation—but there’s always a religious dimension to empire; there’s always a sort of imperial religion, even in an empire like the Soviet Empire, that ostensibly was atheistic; there was functionally civil religion. You look at the Arab conquests, and immediately after the Arab conquests you find Islam rising up. There is always— The Persian Empire, it was the official Zoroastrian religion. And, again, all of these are enforced. And often the state itself—the empire itself, the emperor himself—is worshiped as a god, as part of this, both Caesar was a god and animated by a divine force, and there was the god Roma: Roma Patriae was worshiped.

And so we can see how that language about the beast from the sea, that there is this kingdom of God and administration of God over the world, and instead one chooses and one therefore worships and serves this imperial administration, which is not simply a human administration but is animated by these hostile spiritual forces of chaos and evil.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and it sets itself up as in competition with the Gospel, because it also is a totalizing, totalitarian force, but it’s force. What God sets up, again, is not about smashing people into worshiping him; it’s given in humility, and again with martyrdom.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and a major part of what happens as the religious function of empire is the creation of founding myths, the rewriting of history, the rewriting of the story of the world, the rewriting of the story of culture, and sort of a preeminent example of this is the beginning of the Roman Empire under Augustus, so Augustus becomes the first Roman emperor; Octavian becomes Augustus. And he has Virgil write the new history of the world, which culminates in Augustus. And he has Ovid go and collect all the disparate traditions of all the tribes and nations and peoples and forge them together into one collective story, one sort of monoculture, one sort of ruling culture. And so the Greeks get their actual culture displaced by a Romanized version of Greek culture. You get the Egyptians, their culture replaced with a Romanized version of Egyptian culture.

And of course the Greeks and then the Romans tried to do that with Judea, and that’s what triggers the Jewish revolts, is their refusal to allow their culture to be Hellenized and then Romanized, because the base of their culture is coming from the Torah, and they choose that instead. But the Greeks and the Romans can’t help but try to force compliance, through force and violence, because that’s the whole ethos of empire.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and that’s why it’s not just sort of competition or whatever; that’s why it’s anti-Christ. It sets itself up as not just against Christ but instead of Christ. It’s doing a parody, so to speak, of what the kingdom of God is actually about. The kingdom of God Christianizes cultures. It doesn’t suppress them; it doesn’t replace them—it Christianizes them in a way that’s healing for mankind and not destructive. The kingdom of God does bring all cultures together under its influence and rule and so forth, but not by force, not by conquest on the human level. There is certainly a spiritual conquest going on, but it’s not about making people, mandatory, do the will of God.

Fr. Stephen: Right.

Fr. Andrew: Well, let’s say some things to wrap up and kind of give us a way forward at the end of this episode about Leviathan, Behemoth, the beasts out of the sea and the earth. To me, the big question is, now that we’ve seen the way that the world, on a macro level, operates, what do we do as Christians or as people who maybe want to become Christians? How do we live the right way? Well, I think it’s pretty clear that we don’t try to beat them at their own game. We don’t try to win by acting like the antichrist empires and leaders. That is not the way; it’s not the way. And the reason why that’s not the way is not just because that’s bad but because that is fundamentally telling a different story of what the world is. I mean, we saw—we heard just now about how Augustus has to rewrite the history of the world in order to justify his rule. That’s the false story; that’s not the real story. That’s not the story that we are actually in; that is a lie being told by these demonic forces, and a lie about the creation of an ultimate empire.

The story that is the story of Christ is the story that, number one, begins, as we know, with the fall into rebellion of certain spiritual powers and then their dragging mankind into their rebellion. And so then the story of Christ is his rescue of us from that slavery, from being dominated by these dark powers and behaving like them and becoming like them. That’s the story, and that the kingdom of God is coming, and now is. And so then what is the response to the coming of the kingdom of God? Well, we see it right there in the gospels: repent. Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand.

The Scripture, throughout its text, is always correcting the takes that paganism is offering. It’s always saying, “No, no, no. This is the real story. This is what’s actually happening.” And, frankly, the narrative that the Scripture offers is much more coherent and takes account of everything in the world in a way that none of these other stories actually do. If you look at them close enough, you’ll always see the cracks. You’ll always see that it doesn’t really work out: there’s something false; there’s some lie down at the bottom of them. The Bible is always correcting these stories and saying, “No, this is the truth.”

And if we understand that we’re in that story and we understand that the people we should be emulating are our Lord, who doesn’t come wielding a sword to strike down human beings, but he comes and he offers himself to die—he does strike down his enemies; his enemies are the dark powers—but he dies for us: it’s mankind that he’s offering himself for, so that we can benefit from that, so that we can be rescued from that slavery.

When we see that we’re supposed to be like the Lord, and we look at the way the saints are like the Lord—again, offering themselves; again—martyrdom, humility: this is the way; this is completely different than the way that the Leviathan-Behemoth systems work. It’s not about destruction and domination and tyranny and so forth; it’s about love. When we see that, then we see exactly how we’re supposed to live. We see how we can be faithful in the midst of this.

One of the themes that’s really kind of intriguing in a lot of this discussion is this theme that we see, as we titled it, “Leviathan: It’s What’s for Dinner,” that chaos can serve order; that chaos can literally be served to order as food, as nourishment. And I think that’s one of the things that we’re called to as Christians, is even as we live in the midst of a world that is animated by these dark, demonic powers, we can take what’s around us and turn it to good. Man meant it for evil—because he was inspired by demons to make it evil—but God turns it to good.

And so we are called to participate in God’s works in this world, and that’s one of them: to take what is evil and to turn it to good. And so we can take what we see around us, even the stories that we see around us, even pagan stories, but even the stuff that’s happening around us right at this moment, we can take that and turn it to what is good: by interpreting it, by critiquing it, by seeing how sometimes in surprising, unusual ways, things that are dark and tragic can be turned to beauty and towards hope for the future and towards life and love, sacrifice, all these things.

So, yes, there is an eschatological reality in which Leviathan is going to be cut up and served to the people in the wilderness, but there is also a present reality in which we can do the same thing, in which we can take the leviathanic, if I may say, cultures that we live in and use them for the service of Christ’s Gospel, for his kingdom, for the rescuing of mankind from these dark, demonic forces.

I’ve loved having this conversation. I think it’s one of the most interesting and intriguing ones we’ve had so far. And that’s my take-away. Father?

Fr. Stephen: So I’m not on social media, so I’m going to go ahead and get myself canceled. [Laughter] Who knows how long it will even take me to find out about it? I was going to say “today,” but this has been going on for a while, but there’s been another flare up of it today. There are a lot of folks—you can find them on the internet; you can find them in all kinds of media—who are veryconcerned—and I know we have listeners in other countries, but I’m in the United States—very concerned that the United States or the Western world, whatever we want to say that is, or the liberal democratic tradition, as we heard it expressed by our caller, that that is about to collapse into something else, something more like empire, something more like tyranny, the kind of thing we’ve been describing as being motivated by Behemoth and Leviathan. And if you’re a person who’s worried about that, I have bad news for you: It happened about 50 years ago.

So if you do even a casual study of history and really dig into it, the British Empire was the empire. It really died in World War I, but it was kind of coughing up blood a little until World War II. And then after World War II, frankly, the British handed the baton to the United States of America to become the new empire. And, as always happens at the beginning of that, everything looks good—the Roman Empire had an auspicious beginning; Alexander’s conquest had an auspicious beginning—but since then it has taken its course, and now that’s where we are. The world now is either dominated by the United States of America militarily and/or dominated by our culture: our movies, our television, with all of the elements of our media—that’s our main production; we don’t build actual objects any more: we make culture and send that culture, with all the sex, violence, blasphemy, and everything else that we Christians criticize about it, all over the world, to indoctrinate the world in consumerism and all of those good things.

It’s not about sitting and worrying about whether and when we’re going to be in that situation; we are in that situation. Christians have pretty much always been in that situation. Either they lived in the headquarters of that empire, or they lived in a place where that empire was a threatening presence. So the question then is: Well, what do we do about it? Is this just hopeless? Do we just sort of brace ourselves for incoming martyrdom? Is there nothing we can do except pray that our suffering is not prolonged? There’s a lot more we can do than that, but to do that we have to come back to real Christianity, what Christianity actually is. What do I mean by that?

We live in a society. All societies have a base, and that base is grounded in sort of material realities. Then, built on that reality, that base, that foundation of reality, you have a super structure, and that super structure is all the cultural elements that we think about, and they’re supported by that base; they feed back into that base. They promote and they serve that base. And for the entirety of the modern period—I’ll be blunt: the entirety of the modern period in the West and even in a lot of Orthodox countries, Christianity has not been part of the base of our society; it’s been part of the super structure. It’s been serving the material realities of various empires and cultures and civilizations.

I can give lots of examples. Christians lined up to defend King Leopold killing 10 million people in the Congo to turn it into a rubber farm. One closer to home, for folks in the United States of America: when slavery became a material necessity in order to continue the cotton and sugar harvests in the plantation system. All of a sudden, Christians found Bible verses supporting the enslavement of Africans, and all of the horrible and brutal violence inflicted upon them. Christianity served what was necessary for the culture. That’s not actually Christianity. That’s the beast from the earth. That’s antichrist. When Christianity distorts itself and contorts itself to fit its culture, to serve its needs, to serve the ruler of that culture, that is a twisting and a perversion of Christianity.

Real Christianity—and I know I’m disagreeing with someone publicly on this, but real Christianity is revolutionary in the truest sense, because real Christianity has the power to transform the base, because real Christianity has the ability to change reality by changing people. Real Christianity is the only thing on earth—the Gospel is the only thing on earth that can transform humanity, not just an individual human doing morally better, but transform who and what we are to be more like Christ, meaning we can change that base. This has happened once before in history. This happened with the Roman Empire. St. Paul set out to convert the Roman emperor to Christianity. That was his goal; that’s why he went to Rome. He says so a couple of times in the book of Acts. That didn’t happen during his earthly life; that happened with Constantine.

When St. Constantine became a Christian, the base which supported the entire culture o the Roman Empire changed. So there were any number of elements of Roman culture that were no longer supported by that base, and it crumbled. The Roman view of sexuality crumbled. The Roman view of men and women crumbled. The Roman pagan religion crumbled. The Roman view of humanity as being stratified, as people who are more and less human, crumbled. And all those elements of Roman culture which were good and positive and godly were all reinforced and strengthened by the transformation of that base.

So we have the power through the Gospel to change the fundamental reality of our society and our culture, but that doesn’t start by us going and trying to convert the president of our country. That doesn’t start there—not that that’s a bad thing to do. That doesn’t start by us trying to convert other civil authorities; that starts with us converting ourselves. That starts with us discovering true Christianity again and being transformed, not using Christianity in our own lives to shore up and defend the things we already believe or want to be true or the way of life that we want to live, but instead being transformed by it.

I’ll be blunt. If you’ve become a Christian or you’ve joined the Orthodox Church and become an Orthodox Christian, and it hasn’t changed how you eat, how you dress, how you act in your family, how you do your job at work, how you apportion your time, how you look at and treat and handle your finances—if any of those things are untouched, you have not converted to Christianity. You’ve started to, and that’s good—it’s good to start—but you haven’t finished. The revolution has to start in a transformation of your own life. And when your own life is transformed, when the basic principles of your life, the things that your life is built upon, change, and all the parts that don’t need to be there that are sinful and corrupt crumble away, and all of the good parts that were created and put there by God are reinforced, that will put you in the position, then, to go out and start changing those around you, and ultimately to transform our culture, our communities, our nations, our tribes. That’s where it changes, and that’s where it starts.

So, bad news: we’re living in an empire, too. Good news: we’ve seen once before that our Fathers in the faith, our fellow Christians, were able to completely transform it and defeat it through Christ. And we can do the same thing if, number one, we’re willing to stop worrying about whether it’s an empire or not and being afraid, and, number two, if we’re willing to being with ourselves and be radically transformed in a revolutionary way, and then go out, and with the Gospel, not with force and violence, bring revolution to our society.

Fr. Andrew: Amen! Well, that is our show for today. Thank you very much for listening. If you didn’t get a chance to call in during a live broadcast, we’d still love to hear from you either via email at lordofspirits@ancientfaith.com; or you can message us at our Lord of Spirits podcast Facebook page. We do read everything, but we can’t respond to everything. We do save some of what you send for possible use in future episodes.

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Fr. Andrew: And please buy my new book, Arise, O God!, and also Fr. Stephen’s book which came out earlier this year, Religion of the Apostles at store.ancientfaith.com. Thank you, good night, God bless you all.