fantastic creature.  He gives his life to that pursuit, and for it.  The whale's death and her last gesture, turning her face towards the sky, invokes an Ahabian observation about whales: "life dies sunwards full of faith; but see! no sooner dead, than death whirls round the corpse, and it heads some other way."  Though mortal, a dying whale captures the full vertical axis of this life: up, down, and into the ineffable things as through the telescope of Melville's eye.  

 

That Moby Dick deals with Judeo-Christianity's take on ineffable things is clear from the start.  Straight off, we meet Ishmael and a strong moral principle and a dreamy Sabbath afternoon (Ch. 1).  But of the sea, make no mistake, "there is magic in it...meditation and water are wedded forever."  Magic and meditation, paganism and Eastern religion, these come to dwell in the depths of the sea.  If Judeo-Christianity needed Noah's Flood to eradicate the unrighteous generation and establish the first monotheistic covenant, preserving life in its ark of salvation, Melville is here to remind us that the flood did not conquor the sea and its monsters.  Leviathan survives. God agrees. The book never abandons its land-locked monotheism, but some of the best insights into religion and spirituality come as a result of its oceanic co-star, the great white whale.  

 

If you were only to read Genesis 1, you might miss an important detail about God's oceanic world. On the fifth day, when God first begins to create the animal kingdom, sea monsters (תנינם) get a special spotlight among the "swarms of living creatures" in the sea (vv. 20-21). The Leviathan is not yet present, but those of 'his kind' are the first named genus of Genesis. Oceanic monsters are kings of the animals.

 

Leviathan (לויתן) simply means 'whale' in modern Hebrew. Point of interest, Leviathan is not the beast that swallows Jonah. That sci-fi-ready creature, not even a 'sea monster,' is simply refered to as a 'big fish' (דג גדול) who only came to denote a whale or sea monster because of contact with Greek mythology and some confusion around the Latin translation. No, unlike this important big fish, the Leviathan whale gets little biblical screen time; but in terms of divine drama, he plays a very big role. God's enemy, Leviathan dies as an example of monotheistic Creative triumph. In Pslam 74, God breaks the sea, a gesture which includes skull fractures to the sea monsters and the heads of Leviathan. God kicks some serious whale tail. But waste not want not: Leviathan's body will be given as food for the people who live in the wilderness.  

 

The mythic end to Leviathan's life gets a little more attention in an oracle of Isaiah. This one is punitive. Instead of using Leviathan's death as a mark of creative triumph, Yhwh slays and punishes Leviathan for being 'slant' and 'tortuous' (NRSV).  ...Or 'elusive' and 'twisting' if you like the JPS translation, which I do.  That's in verse 1. In typically sparse Hebrew style, the poetics of this slaughter are brief. Verse 2 just says, "On that day, sing of her: 'a vineyard of foaming wine!'" (in most Hebrew manuscript traditions). The murder scene yields volumes of blood-red ocean water akin to a churning wine vat. This spectacle turns out to be special to Yhwh. Yhwh guards by day and night the bloody vat of sea, adding water to it like the three witches of Macbeth: "Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and caldron bubble." This image is quite unsettling, and makes little sense. It crashes the scene with violent haste, a shot of the end before the story has been told. The bloody vat of sea captures the whale's death; it is an image of judgment by what one might assume to be divine wrath (v. 3). 

 

But what can this passage be, beyond a tale of God killing the whale? Reading further, the theme of divine anger comes to the fore. And here, I think, is a key line: "Lest my anger visit it" (v. 3). God dwells above the frothing bloody death of his whale to stave off the surplus of his anger. God admits that if he were made of kindling, the cosmic event would burn him up completely (v. 4). The verses describe a contest of divine power held in check by an epic self-mastery of emotion. We quickly learn that Yhwh's refuge, his position in heaven, his safe zone is under threat (v. 5). But mind you, the threat to his safety does not come from Leviathan's counter-attack. The enemy of God turns out to be divine anger itself. He self-empties: "Fury is not in me" (v. 4). Sounds a very zen massacre.

 

Was Yhwh able to conquor a rage that Ahab could not? Wrath does ravish Ahab during his own quest to slay the monster in the sea. And it doesn't take a scholar to note that he had a tendency toward madness. And vengeance: "I'd strike the sun if it insulted me," noting that his vengeance for the whale would "fetch a great premium" (Ch. 36). If recompense led him along, it seems Ahab shared more in common with our Psalmic Yhwh who provides a whale feast for those in the wilderness than with this strage Isaianic divinity who chooses to guard the frothing blood for peace.  EDIT:  NEED QUOTE AND DISCUSSION OF AHAB'S WRATH.  Ahab's quest would not, in the end, assail the great Isaiah's oracle. Yhwh's rageless slaughter could not be matched in Ahab's person. Ahab never seemed to understand the psalmic adage of creation: "There go the ships, and Leviathan that you formed to sport in it" (Psalm 104:26).

 

So the sea is filled with powers.  ...and humans are an emotional lot. Whether whale or typhoon, the Pequod spends the bluk of its time tending to the technologies that would bear up in the midst of these cataclysms and weather events.  Whether under cosmic or meteorological storms, human subjects, like vessels, like agents, or like some strange mix of the two, bear up or break down.  The shipmates never seem to prepare the rig enough.

 

On land, Melville's Sabbath and churches assume the role of the ship on the sea.  'Ishmael walks into a church' and with that Melville pens a chapter's worth of musings on its pulpit (Ch. 8).  The ascent was designed as a ladder, hung about with ropes.  The Father "with a truly sailor-like but still reverential dexterity, hand over hand, mounted the steps as if ascending the main-top of his vessel."  What takes place when the preacher reaches the top and takes hold of her pulpit, like a helm?  

 

What could be more full of meaning? - for the pulpit is ever this earth's foremost part; all the rest comes in its rear; the pulpit leads the world. From thence it is the storm of God's quick wrath is first decried, and the bow must bear the earliest brunt.  From thence it is the God of breezes fair or foul is first invoked for favorable winds.  Yes, the world's a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete; and the pulpit is its prow. (Ch. 8)

 

If Melville takes an entire chapter to reflect on the meaning and description of a sanctuary's archetectural decisions, it should come as no surprise that the main topic, whales, receives the bulk of this kind of mundane attention.  Chapters on "etymology and extracts," "cetology," and "of the less erroneous pictures of whales and the true pictures" (this following the chapter "of the monstrous pictures of whales,") are tough reading for those looking for a basic adventure tale.  Hollywood surely would put these scenes on the chopping blocks.  

 

But in them, we learn that the great white whale's antiquity is only to be surpassed by its perpetuity. Furnishing evidence from the Ninevah tablets, to Aldrovandus, Pliny and time's students of natural history, Melville concludes: "wherefore, for all these things, we account the whale immortal in his species, however perishable in his individuality."  And with that, Melville gets to his point.  

 

He swam the seas before the continents broke water; he swam over the site of the Tuileries, and Windsor Castle, and the Kremlin.  In Noah's flood he despised Noah's Ark; and if ever the world is to be again flooded, like the Netherlands, to kill off its rats, then the eternal whale will survive, and rearing upon the topmost crest of the equatorial flood, spout his frothed defiance to the skies. (Ch. 105)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

EDIT:  a few lines about this passage...leading to>>>

 

The endless pages of whale taxonomy are not wasted ink in Moby Dick.  Eternal things should be studied closely and with love.  

 

This same love animates the longest description of Leviathan in the Hebrew Tanakh.  Job 31:1-34.  

 

 

 

Western Monotheism:

 

Mene, Mene, Tekel Upharsin (ch. 119)

 

 

 

God's burning finger on the ship, writing with shrouds and cordage in the mass of sailing technology in chaos with an oncoming typhoon.  

 

 

 

Chapters on Jonah and Jeroboam.  

 

Chapter on Ramadan.  

 

 

Conclusion:

 

So if fury did not compell Yhwh to slay Leviathan, than what is this tendency in monotheism, this tendency that haunts all of Western tradition, for God to burn and slay and punish things?  

 

 

 

Killing the Buddha >>> if I preside well over his death, he will make peace for me.  

 

Or lest he overpower my place of safety, let him generate peace for me.  Peace. Let him make it for me.    

 

1 In that day the LORD with His sore and great and strong sword will punish leviathan the slant serpent, and leviathan the tortuous serpent; and He will slay the dragon that is in the sea. {S}

2 In that day sing ye of her: 'A vineyard of foaming wine!'

3 I the LORD do guard it, I water it every moment; lest Mine anger visit it, I guard it night and day.

4 Fury is not in Me; would that I were as the briers and thorns in flame! I would with one step burn it altogether.

5 Or else let him take hold of My strength, that he may make peace with Me; yea, let him make peace with Me.

 

Ishmael witnessed the sinking ship.  His floating body rounded towards the center of the watery vortex.  He with not but a remnant of the mast to cling to.  Manging not to drown, his rescue by a ship named Rachel, who was searching for her children...invokes Jeremiah.