However, it is not clear what animal the ancient Hebrews had in mind. The renowned eleventh-century commentator, Rashi, identified these “large fish” as the leviathan, and this is the term that the knowledgeable King James translators passed on to us, in their well-wrought English. This beast is called the teninim, in the plural, for in ancient Hebrew the plural is often used to signify immense significance, as in the very name of the Creator, Elokim. The “anti-Mosaic” beast to which Ishmael refers appears in the very on the first page of the Five Books of Moses, where it is found among those animals brought forth on the fifth day of creation. His dull physicality prevented him from grasping his father’s covenant, even though Ishmael means “Man of God.” “Horror-struck,” Ishmael, named after the first-born son of Abraham, acknowledges that the Leviathan has infiltrated and overwhelmed his mind, as was the case for the original Ishmael, who was cast out. I am horror-struck at this anti-Mosaic, unsourced existence of the whale, which, having been before all time, must needs exist after all humane ages are over” (104). Thus says Ishmael, Moby Dick’s, narrator: “When I stand among these mighty Leviathan skeletons, skulls, tusks, jaws, ribs, and vertebrae, all characterized by partial resemblances to the existing breeds of sea-monsters. Indeed, Melville refers to Ahab’s fatal whale, Moby Dick, as a leviathan, matching the Hebrew-named captain with a beast named in the Hebrew Bible. But the idea of a leviathan has a much richer set of meanings in literary English. In modern English, a leviathan is any huge being, man or beast, especially a whale.
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