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Thursday, December 06, 2007
Croco-satan
This, we know: in modern Hebrew Liv-yatan means ‘whale’, and in English ‘Leviathan’ refers to any huge sea-monster, or (pace Hobbes) any vast monster at all. It’s in the Bible, you know. Job, 41:1, ‘Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down?’.
Now, browsing the lovely Google-books facsimile of an 1863 volume of the Quarterly Review, I read this:
Of the animals of Egypt, the most remarkable are the crocodile and the hippopotamus; the former being occasionally mentioned [in the Bible] under the Hebrew name liv-yathan, the leviathan of the authorised version, while the latter-named animal is denoted by the Hebrew behemoth … In the 41st chapter of Job it undoubtedly represents the crocodile of the nile and no other animal, notwithstanding the assertion of Sir G. Wilkinson to the contrary. [48-9]
Sir G. Wilkinson? Pooh-pooh, who believes anything he says. Now, I’d never before heard this interpretation of liv-yathan; it may, for all I know, be a much-discussed feature of Biblical scholarship, but it hasn’t filtered down far enough to reach me. Then again, going through the forty-first chapter of Job, I began to wonder whether this anonymous Victorian Quarterly-reviewer doesn’t have a point.
Look at the way the Leviathan is described.
Canst thou fill his skin with barbed irons? … Who can open the doors of his face? his teeth are terrible round about. His scales are his pride, shut up together as with a close seal. One is so near to another, that no air can come between them. … The flakes of his flesh are joined together: they are firm in themselves; they cannot be moved. His heart is as firm as a stone … The sword of him that layeth at him cannot hold: the spear, the dart, nor the habergeon. He esteemeth iron as straw and brass as rotten wood. The arrow cannot make him flee: slingstones are turned with him into stubble. Darts are counted as stubble: he laugheth at the shaking of a spear.
Crocodilar, I’d say. Anon. Vict. then points out that Milton, in Paradise Lost, representing Leviathan as a whale, also articulates the widespread view that this beast is a type of Satan himself:
…that sea-beast
Leviathan, which God of all his works
Created hugest that swim th’ ocean-stream.
Him, haply slumbering on the Norway foam,
The pilot of some small night-foundered skiff,
Deeming some island, oft, as seamen tell,
With fixed anchor in his scaly rind,
Moors by his side under the lee, while night
Invests the sea, and wished morn delays.
So stretched out huge in length the Arch-fiend lay,
Chained on the burning lake.
Anon. V. gives us other examples of this interpretation of Leviathan.
Cartwright asserts ‘that many of the ancients both by behemoth and by leviathan understand the devil’. Mercer says ‘Nostri collegerunt, hanc descriptionem Leviathanis ad Satanam pertinere;’ and again—‘Multa in Leviathanis descriptione nulli alii quam Diabolo, aut saltem non adeo proprie congruent.’ [50]
So … Satan as a crocodile. Now that I come to think of that, it makes sense. Here, for instance, is a splendidly diabolic image from Bestiary.ca of a crocodile devouring a man. It’s either that, or an image of a strange hybrid beast with six legs, four green and two pink. But either way he’s got a nasty look about him.
An opportunity for the first ever LOL-crocosatan, right there. The Bestiary.ca site (I can’t, incidentally, recommend the whole site too strongly if you’ve a few minuts free for browsing) also gives us this intriguing description:
The crocodile is a four-footed beast, about twenty cubits long, that is born in the Nile River. Its skin is very hard, so that it is not hurt when struck by stones. It spends the day on land and the night in the water. It is armed with cruel teeth and claws; it is the only animal that can move the upper part of its jaw while keeping the lower part still. Its dung can be used to enhance a person’s beauty: the excrement (or the contents of the intestines) is smeared on the face and left there until sweat washes it off.
As my daughter is fond of saying at the moment: eeewww.
This, as professor of nineteenth-century literature, I know: Lewis Carroll, in his Clark-Kenty Charles Dodgson persona, was a religiously devout Tory, and a reader of the Quarterly Review. Almost certainly he read this January 1863 issue, and very likely he pondered the anonymous article on the croc-viathan. His river trip with the Liddell girls, the inspiration for Alice in Wonderland happened in the summer of 1863; the first draft of Alice was completed November 1864, and the book as we now have it was published in July 1865. Could this factoid about crocodiles and their diabolic Biblical identities be behind this famous Wonderland poem?
How doth the little crocodile
Improve his shining tail,
And pour the waters of the Nile
On every golden scale!How cheerfully he seems to grin,
How neatly he spreads his claws,
And welcomes little fishes in,
With gently smiling jaws!
Comments
"How doth the beast Leviathan
Improve his shining tail
And Nilar waters pour upon
His every golden scale!”
Its dung can be used to enhance a person’s beauty: the excrement (or the contents of the intestines) is smeared on the face and left there until sweat washes it off.
Whattacrocashit!
Sorry. Whereof it’s unspeakable, thereof it just hadda be said.
Crococrocoshit, indeed.