‘Canst thou draw out Leviathan with an hook?’: Job 41 in Hobbes’ Masterpiece
- Peter McLaughlin
- Jun 22, 2021
- 12 min read
Updated: Jun 27
Can you draw out Leviathan with a fishhook,
or press down its tongue with a cord?
Can you put a rope in its nose,
or pierce its jaw with a hook?
Will it make many supplications to you?
Will it speak soft words to you?
Will it make a covenant with you
to be taken as your servant forever?[1]
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The rich symbolic inner workings of Hobbes’ Leviathan have been much commented on in the centuries since its publication, with most attention being given to its incomparable frontispiece. But fewer interpreters (especially today) comment in detail on the reference to the Book of Job in Hobbes’ title, a reference that Hobbes mentions explicitly in the text.[2] I want to offer an interpretation of the image of Leviathan that connects it directly with some of Hobbes’ central concerns (his ideas about human nature, sovereignty, and covenant), and that helps us understand the place of symbolism, metaphor, and literature in Hobbes’ famously mechanistic politics.
A brief synopsis of the book of Job. Job, a ‘blameless and upright’ man who ‘feared God and turned away from evil’,[3] has been tested by the Lord. Everything he owned has been taken from him, his family have been killed, and his body is covered in painful sores, to the point that he curses the day of his birth: ‘Let those curse it who curse the Sea, / those who are skilled to rouse up Leviathan’.[4] The bulk of the text consists of verse dialogue between Job and three of his friends about the problem of theodicy: how can Job, a blameless man, be made to suffer by God? His friends argue that he cannot have been truly blameless, that he must have acted so as to justify his punishment. Job continues to insist on his innocence.
Hobbes’ reference is to the climax of the text, where the Lord answers Job ‘out of the whirlwind’: ‘Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?’[5] The Lord’s (somewhat ironic) response is not to prove that Job was deserving of suffering, but merely to humble him, rhetorically—even sarcastically—asking:
Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
