G. K. Chesterton suggests that as Job listens to God’s speeches, “he feels the terrible and tingling atmosphere of something which is too good to be told. The refusal of God to explain his design is itself a burning hint of his design.”

What is conveyed to Job—and to us—in the Behemoth and Leviathan descriptions is indeed almost too good to be told.

And yet it’s true.

Leviathan and Behemoth—Figures of Darkness

It seems Behemoth may be the storybook embodiment of the figure of death. And the Leviathan in biblical imagery is the archenemy of God. In the Leviathan we see the embodiment of beastliness, of terror, of undiluted evil. When, at the climax of his description, we read “he is king over all the sons of pride” (41:34), we’re reading of the one who elsewhere is called “Beelzebul, the prince of demons” (Matt. 12:24).

This second divine speech to Job addresses the problem of supernatural evil in the created order. This is clear in Job 40:8–14. Job has questioned God’s justice (40:8). So God challenges him to do the job of judging all the earth (40:11)—that is, to bring low the proud and to tread down the wicked (40:12). “If you can do that,” says the Lord, in essence, “then I will admit that you can save yourself. But you can’t” (40:14).

So the figures of Behemoth and Leviathan come not as an anticlimax, but rather use the language of well-known stories to make the point that only the Lord can keep evil on a leash. The Leviathan is “the ruler of this world” (John 12:31), “the prince of the power of the air”—that supernatural region that lies above us but below God’s heaven (Eph. 2:2).

So here’s a creature that’s the ruler of all the proud. “If you can tame him, Job, then we may be sure you can tame all the proud. But you can’t, Job, can you?” Indeed we see in Job 19 that it’s precisely this monster who’s been savaging Job and making his life such utter misery all this time. Job can’t take him on. The point of Job 41 is to make us tremble at the awesome and full power of the prince of evil.

If we thought evil was bad, when we come face to face with the Leviathan we realize it’s infinitely more frightening than we had thought. “You cannot begin to take on the problem of evil, Job. And you know that.”

The Devil Is God’s Devil

“But I can!” says the Lord. That’s the point.

This awesome monster is “a creature” (41:33), a created thing. “I made him too, and I can tame him. And he is on my leash, even if he cannot be on yours” (cf. 41:5). We see similar deprecating comedy in Psalm 104:26, with its calm description of Leviathan as placed in the sea to frolic, as a parent might put an unruly child in a secure playpen to play.

Here’s the point. A walker enters a farmyard and is terrified by wild dogs, snarling and snapping around his ankles. He’s scared. The question he’s bound to ask is, Are these dogs restrained in any way? Are they on a leash? Is there an owner around who can call them off? As Job suffers, his greatest and deepest fear is that the monster who attacks him is unrestrained, that the attacks will go on forever, with unrelieved ferocity, and that the monster has been given a free hand—unlimited access to Job and his life. He’s afraid there exists no sovereign God who has evil on a leash.