Litan

The Ugaritic word ltn survives on a single column of a single tablet (KTU 1.5, column I, lines 1–3), where the god of death Mot taunts Baal with what Baal once did to a sea creature. The lines read, in standard translation: “When you killed Litan the fleeing serpent, finished off the twisting serpent, the tyrant with seven heads, the heavens grew weak and drooped.” Three lines. Twenty-two words in the Ugaritic. They are the most consequential three lines of mythology that any modern reader has never heard of.

The reason the lines matter is that the same vocabulary appears in the Hebrew Bible nine hundred years later, attached to a creature called Leviathan. The Ugaritic ltn and the Hebrew liwyatan are linguistically the same word. The epithets are the same. The killer is different.

Appearance

Litan has seven heads. The Ugaritic phrase is šlyt d šb’t ršm, “the tyrant with seven heads.” He is described twice as btn brh (“fleeing serpent”) and btn ‘qltn (“twisting” or “coiled serpent”). He lives in the sea. He is a body that drapes across the sky when it rises out of the water, the line “the heavens grew weak and drooped” is usually read as the cosmic effect of his slaughter.

Iconographically, the most famous depiction predates the Ugaritic text by several centuries. A cylinder seal from Tell Asmar, dated around 2300 BCE, shows two heroes attacking a seven-headed serpent. Three of the heads are already drooping in death. The Tell Asmar seal is one of the earliest pieces of figurative narrative art in any tradition. Whether it depicts a direct ancestor of Litan or an independent regional version of the seven-headed serpent is debated. Either way, the seven-headed sea snake is older than writing.

In later Hebrew tradition, the artist’s job becomes more difficult. Job 41 describes Leviathan with smoke from his nostrils, fire from his mouth, scales that fit so tight no air passes between them, and a heart “as hard as a stone, hard as a piece of the lower millstone.” Whether this is the same body as Litan or an evolved version of him is the central question of every commentary on Job.

Function

Litan is the chaos monster. His function in the Baal Cycle is to be killed. The slaying happens before the surviving narrative starts. We hear about it through the taunt of Mot, the way one hears about a famous victory at second hand. The three-line summary is enough to establish that Baal is the kind of god who kills seven-headed sea serpents.

The cosmological work the killing does is foundational. Across the ancient Near East, the storm god’s defeat of the sea monster is the act that makes ordered cosmos possible. The chaos of the sea is bound. The earth becomes habitable. The heavens hold their place. Marduk does this to Tiamat. Yahweh does it to Leviathan and Rahab. Indra does it to Vritra. Baal does it to Yam and to Litan.

Whether Yam and Litan are two figures or two aspects of the same figure is one of the long-running debates in Ugaritic studies. The simplest reading: Yam is the sea as political enemy, the rival prince in El’s assembly. Litan is the sea as monster, the body of the deep itself. Killing one is a coup. Killing the other is creation.

Cross-Cultural Connections

The most consequential connection is biblical. Isaiah 27:1: “On that day Yahweh with his hard and great and strong sword will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent, and he will kill the dragon that is in the sea.” The Hebrew is liwyatan nahash bariah, liwyatan nahash ‘aqallaton. Compare the Ugaritic ltn btn brh and btn ‘qltn. The phrases are not similar. They are translation pairs. Isaiah is using vocabulary that an Iron Age audience still recognized as Levantine combat-myth vocabulary, swapping the actor.

Psalm 74:14 reinforces the borrowing: “You crushed the heads of Leviathan; you gave him as food for the creatures of the wilderness.” The plural heads is significant. In a strict monotheistic frame the detail is decorative. In the Ugaritic frame it preserves Litan’s seven.

The Tell Asmar seal points to a Mesopotamian background that may also feed the same stream. The Akkadian Anzu myth has Ninurta defeat a chaos bird. Tiamat is split. The Greek Hydra of Lerna, killed by Heracles, has multiple heads that grow back when cut. The structural family is enormous. Litan is the Northwest Semitic representative.

In later Jewish tradition Leviathan is given a paired creature, Behemoth, the land monster. The Talmud (Bava Batra 74b) says God will slay Leviathan in the messianic age and serve his flesh to the righteous at the eschatological feast. The chaos serpent has become a symbol of the world that awaits its final undoing. The Christian Apocalypse converts the same figure into the dragon of Revelation 12, with seven heads and ten horns. The seven heads are still there, three thousand years after the Tell Asmar seal.

Modern Survival

Litan’s name does not survive. Leviathan does. The English word is a transliteration of the Hebrew, which is a continuation of the Ugaritic, which is probably a continuation of an even older West Semitic root for “coil” or “wreath.” The same root produces the Arabic liwa, “wreath,” and the modern Hebrew liyya, “coil.” The serpent’s body is a wreath of muscle.

Hobbes used Leviathan as the name of his book on the absolute state in 1651. Melville used the word repeatedly for the white whale. Modern English uses leviathan as a common noun for any colossal entity. Each of these usages is built on top of the Ugaritic ltn, slain by Baal in the lines that Mot used to taunt his enemy.

In contemporary scholarship, the Litan-to-Leviathan continuity is one of the textbook cases of Northwest Semitic religion’s afterlife inside Judaism and Christianity. The line “the heavens grew weak and drooped” is one of the most frequently quoted lines in Ugaritic studies. The seven heads have not been reduced to one. The serpent is still seven heads tall.

Sources

Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.

• Baal Cycle (KTU 1.5 I 1–3), Ugaritic clay tablet, scribed by Ilimilku (c. 1350–1315 BCE)
• Mark S. Smith and Wayne T. Pitard, The Ugaritic Baal Cycle, vol. 2 (Brill, 2009)
• John Day, God’s Conflict with the Dragon and the Sea (Cambridge University Press, 1985)
• Hebrew Bible parallels: Isaiah 27:1, Psalm 74:14, Job 41