The Leviathan and recent Earthquakes
By the Be Awake Aware Alive team
Our thoughts and prayers go to all those involved in the recent earthquakes around the world. There is something profoundly unsettling about earthquakes. Not merely the physical shaking—though that is terrifying enough—but the way they remind us, in an instant, of our smallness. One moment the ground is solid, dependable, the very foundation of our lives. The next, it heaves and rolls like the surface of a restless sea, and we are cast adrift on a planet that refuses to be tamed.
In recent weeks, that reminder has come with unusual frequency and force.
A World in Motion
Just last week, a magnitude 6.2 earthquake struck off the coast of eastern Indonesia, near the island of Halmahera in North Maluku province. The tremor, which occurred at a depth of 120 kilometers, sent chairs rocking and hearts racing. The Indonesian Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency confirmed there was no tsunami threat, but the fear—that primal, visceral fear—was real enough.
Nor was this an isolated event. The German Research Centre for Geosciences recorded a 6.3-magnitude quake in the same Halmahera region. Earlier, on June 27, a magnitude 6.0 earthquake shook the Hindu Kush mountain range in Afghanistan, sending tremors across the border into Pakistan. Residents in Swat district ran from their homes as the ground shook violently; women and children were crying in the streets.
And before that, in late June, the world witnessed a remarkable cluster of powerful quakes: two devastating tremors struck Venezuela just 39 seconds apart—a magnitude 7.3 foreshock followed by a 7.5 main shock—while a 5.6-magnitude quake hit Northern California and a 6.9-magnitude tremor struck off the coast of Japan, all within a single 24-hour period.
Experts caution that these events are largely coincidental; the faults are too distant to be connected. But to the human heart, patterns need not be causal to feel meaningful. When the earth shakes so frequently, so violently, across so many corners of the globe, it is natural to wonder: What is happening?
The Monster Beneath
This is where the ancient imagination offers us something strange and strangely apt: the Leviathan.
In the Hebrew Bible, Leviathan appears as a primordial sea creature of immense power—a dragon of the deep, a twisting serpent, a force of chaos that lurks in the watery abyss. In the Ugaritic myths that predate the biblical texts, Leviathan symbolized the destructive forces of the sea and the chaos that threatens all established order. The Psalmist sings of God crushing "the heads of Leviathan", and the prophet Isaiah declares that the Lord will one day bring judgment upon "Leviathan, the fleeing serpent".
But perhaps the most vivid portrait comes from the Book of Job, where God challenges the suffering patriarch:
"Can you pull in Leviathan with a hook or tie down his tongue with a rope?"
The description that follows is one of terrifying, untamable power. When Leviathan rises, "the mighty are terrified". Its flesh is hard and cannot be penetrated. "Leviathan makes the water boil with its commotion. It stirs the depths like a pot of ointment".
Some scholars have noted a direct connection between Leviathan and earthquakes. One reading suggests that when the great creature moves, an earthquake is produced. Another ancient motif describes Leviathan causing cataclysm by striking the earth with its tail. In this reading, the monster's thrashing is not merely mythic poetry—it is an attempt to name the unnameable force that makes the ground tremble.
Chaos and Control
What makes the Leviathan such a powerful metaphor for our present moment may not be the existence of the creature itself, but what it represents. Leviathan is chaos—the chaos that exists just beneath the surface of our ordered lives, the chaos that no amount of human engineering can fully contain.
We build skyscrapers and seismically retrofitted bridges. We map fault lines and issue early warnings. We understand plate tectonics and the mechanics of subduction. And yet, when the earth moves, we are still afraid. We still run into the streets. We still cry out.
The earthquakes of recent days—in Indonesia, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Japan, California—may not be signs of divine punishment, nor are they portents of apocalypse. They are what we think planets do: shifting, settling, releasing the immense pressures that build up over time. Indonesia sits on the Pacific "Ring of Fire," an arc of intense seismic activity stretching from Japan through Southeast Asia. The Hindu Kush is a collision zone where the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates grind against each other. Venezuela lies at the boundary of the South American and Caribbean plates. These are geological facts.
But facts do not erase the feeling. And the feeling—the terror, the awe, the sense of being utterly at the mercy of forces far greater than ourselves—is exactly what the ancient myth of Leviathan was designed to capture.
The Depths Beneath
In the biblical imagination, the sea was the place of chaos, the untamed deep that threatened to swallow the world. Leviathan was its king. To speak of Leviathan was to speak of everything human beings cannot control: the storm, the flood, the earthquake, the dark.
The philosopher Arno Schmidt, writing in the twentieth century, understood natural disasters not as contingent accidents but as "defining moments of natural history". He conceived of nature itself as a kind of Leviathan—a force that periodically reminds us of our place in the cosmic order. Disasters, in this view, are not interruptions to the normal course of things; they are the normal course of things, revealed.
Perhaps that is what the recent earthquakes ask us to remember. We live on a living planet, and living things move. The ground beneath our feet is not as solid as we pretend. The Leviathan stirs in the depths, and sometimes we feel it.
Conclusion
We do not need to believe in a literal sea monster to find meaning in the metaphor. The Leviathan is a name for the chaos we cannot master, the power we cannot coerce, the mystery we cannot explain away. When the earth shakes, we are confronted with that chaos directly—as a physical reality that rocks our chairs and rattles our bones.
In the ancient stories, God defeats Leviathan. The monster is subdued, the chaos is ordered, the world is made safe. But in our own lives, the victory is never quite complete. The Leviathan sleeps, but it does not die. And every now and then, it rolls over in its sleep, and the world trembles.
The earthquakes of the past few weeks are hopefully not the end of the world. They are simply the Leviathan stirring—a reminder, in the language of the deep, that we are not as much in control as we like to believe.
And perhaps that is a truth worth remembering, even when—especially when—the ground is still.
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With thanks to Stephen Leonardi at pexels.com for the great image
