ABSTRACT
In rabbinic typology, four exemplary creatures serve as archetypes and rulers in the natural world-the lion over the wild beasts, the ox over the domestic beasts, the eagle over the beasts of the air, and the human being, who is sui generis. However, there are also three entirely mythical beasts that are imagined as being of extraordinary size and strength: the Leviathan, the great sea monster; the Behemoth, the largest and most powerful of wild beasts, sometimes called the Shor HaBar (the wild ox); and the Ziz, which is a bird of epic proportions. It seems that the four archetypical but real creatures were chosen because of their abstract qualities-leonine gravitas, aquiline transcendence, bovine perseverance, and human intellection-whereas the mythical beasts were chosen to represent the abstract qualities of the strata of the universe that they represented: the unfathomable depths of the sea, the ruggedness and impenetrability of the terrain of Earth, and the endless breadth and seemingly endless span of the sky. In this sense, the Leviathan, the Behemoth, and the Ziz are more primal, more demi-god-like, more threatening to the sovereignty of the One
God who created the universe, and more in need of suppression and vanquishing at the moment of the eschaton than the beasts of the natural world.
