What is the Leviathan? and What can it tell us about Ancient Religions?

Fascinating video.
I know, of course, that one has to take everything you hear on the Internet with a grain of salt, because there are a lot of crackpots out there.  But this video lines up fairly well with what I learned from the Yale University lectures on the Old Testament by Christine Hayes.  (If you haven't checked these lectures out yet, they are absolutely fascinating.  Highly recommended.)

In her 3rd lecture, Christine Hayes talks about the creation story in Genesis, and claims that the writers of Genesis were making a deliberate choice to contrast their creation story with the other more violent creation myths of the Middle-East.  And it was a choice because the rest of the Bible clearly indicates the ancient Hebrews had not one, but several creation myths.

And don’t think the biblical writers didn’t know this motif of creation following upon a huge cosmic battle, particularly a battle with a watery, dragon-like monster. There are many poetic passages and poetic sections of the Bible that contain very clear and explicit illusions to that myth. It was certainly known and told to Israelite children and part of the culture. We have it mentioned in Job; we have it mentioned in the following psalm, Psalm 74:12-17: “O God, my king from of old, who brings deliverance throughout the land;/it was You who drove back the sea with Your might, who smashed the heads of the monsters in the waters;/it was You who crushed the heads of Leviathan,” a sea monster. Other psalms also contain similar lines. Isaiah 51:9-10: “It was you that hacked Rahab” — this is another name of a primeval water monster — “in pieces,/[It was you] That pierced the Dragon./It was you that dried up the Sea,/The waters of the great deep.” These were familiar stories, they were known in Israel, they were recounted in Israel. They were stories of a god who violently slays the forces of chaos, represented as watery dragons, as a prelude to creation. And the rejection of this motif or this idea in Genesis 1 is pointed and purposeful. It’s demythologization. It’s removal of the creation account from the realm and the world of mythology. It’s pointed and purposeful. It wants us to conceive of God as an uncontested god who through the power of his word or will creates the cosmos.

I mentioned this before as something that interested me in the Bible Trivia game, but I couldn't find a question to get at it.