Readers of these reflections will be familiar with the employment of the serpent to represent personalized evil, not least because such a creature populates the earliest pages of the Hebrew Bible. In a section of the book of Isaiah that seems to stand on the shoulders of discrete ‘oracles against the nations’ in order to glimpse resistance to YHWH’s purpose at more cosmic level, the Isaiah scroll does the same.
Chapter 27 begins with an exceedingly brief oracle, which I quote here both in Hebrew and in English.
בַּיּ֣וֹם הַה֡וּא יִפְקֹ֣ד יְהוָה֩ בְּחַרְב֨וֹ הַקָּשָׁ֜ה וְהַגְּדוֹלָ֣ה וְהַֽחֲזָקָ֗ה עַ֤ל לִוְיָתָן֙ נָחָ֣שׁ בָּרִ֔חַ וְעַל֙ לִוְיָתָ֔ן נָחָ֖שׁ עֲקַלָּת֑וֹן וְהָרַ֥ג אֶת־הַתַּנִּ֖ין אֲשֶׁ֥ר בַּיָּֽם׃ ס
Isaiah 27:1 (BHS and NRSV)
On that day the LORD with his cruel and great and strong sword will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent, and he will kill the dragon that is in the sea.
The oracle begins with the familiar and non-specific glance toward an unspecified future: ביום ההוא // ֹon that day. But instead of the usual particulars about a specific national adversary, we find YHWH armed as a warrior attacking a snake.
One detects a curious three-part symmetry. YHWH’s sword is ‘his cruel and great and strong sword’. His doomed adversary is Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent … the dragon that is in the sea.’ It may be significant that it is not YHWH himself but rather YHWH’s sword that stands parallel to this enemy. Biblical monotheism is usually written in the cursive of incomparability, and incomparability itself can be declared bluntly or subtly.
I assume that twice-named Leviathan and התנִין (NRSV’s the dragon) are one and the same. YHWH here makes war with a principal adversary, not two.
It is the description of the creature that concerns me most: fleeing … twisting … in the sea.
Not a purveyor of arbitrary parallelism but rather a poetic work of subtle interplay, the book called Isaiah is likely saying something important about the nature of cosmic opposition to YHWH’s purpose, something that presses into the serpent metaphor in order to build upon its possibilities.
First, the serpent is ברח / fleeing. When our eyes, figuratively speaking, fall upon Leviathan, YHWH’s might has already landed in force. Second, the serpent is עקלתון / twisting. One might consider that the descriptor aims chiefly to build upon the fear-engendering movement of a snake. I think, however, that the adjective serves to connote that Leviathan the serpent is difficult to subdue. While such a reading may seem to stand in opposition to the three-part invincibility of YHWH’s sword, it could just as well serve as a touch of Isaianic realism about the nature of opposition to YHWH’s counsel, its tenacity and destructiveness more than evident throughout the oracles against the nations and this more ‘apocalyptic’ section that follows upon them.
Finally, we come to התנין / the dragon. This third of three adjectival clauses turns concretely positional or locative. Israelite cosmology famously assigns to the sea the resonance that is proper to a chaotic, threatening, virtually untamable entity. Here it becomes the dragon’s—and, as I have argued, Leviathan’s—home. If this serpent does not customarily live in the sea—an interpretation I think likely reflects the figure’s intention—he flees to it.
Regardless, YHWH’s sword will be the end of it. The verb in question is no longer the semantically open פקד, commonly in contexts like this one, to visit or to punish (so NRSV). Rather, it is הרג / to kill, an unambiguously lethal brand of punishment. Leviathan, we are told in this briefest of oracles, this fleeing, twisting serpent, shall ‘on that day’ be no more.
Then, if editorial sequencing is to be honored, we read of a vineyard like no other. Its attentive viticulturist has no anger. He almost has to cry out for an enemy to dare to present itself, such is the blooming peace of the place.
Canter Bridge 