Page:Ginzburg - The Legends of the Jews - Volume 5.djvu/60

127] last feast, after which the pure spiritual life will begin, when there will be no bodily needs or pleasures.Those who interpret the Leviathan-Behemoth legends allegorically conceive the Messianic banquet in a spiritual sense.Comp. further below.Targum Yerushalmi Num. 11.26 reads: And they will enjoy the good things which were prepared for them in the pristine times.This is not to be translated, as is done by Bousset, Religion, 327: And they will… to enjoy the meat of the steer.This mistranslation is due to the fact that Bousset incorrectly read for .Comp. also note 79 with regard to the wine of the Messianic banquet.The pseudepigraphic literature already knows the essential elements of the highly developed Leviathan-Behemoth legends found in the later Midrashim.In Enoch 60.7–10 it is asserted, in agreement with BR 7.4, that Leviathan and Behemoth (alluding to Job 40.20 and Ps 50.10–11, Behemoth was described in the Hebrew text of Enoch as, which the translator, however, misunderstood and instead of “field”, i.e., “the dry land”, has  “his breast”) were created on the fifth day, and of these two the former was the female and the latter the male.But they were separated (comp. vol. I, p. 27, with regard to the female of the Leviathan), the male monster, Behemoth, received the desert Dudain for his abode (undoubtedly identical with the desert Dudel, Enoch 10.4; that the latter is situated in the proximity of Jerusalem, the former east of paradise, cannot be urged as an objection to this identification, as the holy city is east of paradise; comp. PRE 20 20, beginning.See further notes 119 and 141 on the habitation of Behemoth in the proximity of paradise), whereas the female Leviathan lives in the depth of the sea.Both, however (verse 24), will serve as food (for the pious; but the text is not very clear here).In 4 Ezra 6.49–52, Enoch is made use of, but at the same time an attempt is made to explain how it happens that the male monster Behemoth lives on the dry land, while his mate, Leviathan, is in the water.The mates of Leviathan and Behemoth are spoken of in rabbinic sources (comp. note 118).Nowhere, however (Targum Yerushalmi I, 21, is based on Baba Batra 74b, and does not maintain, as Gunkel, Schöpfung und Chaos, p. 54, incorrectly asserts, that Behemoth is the wife of Leviathan), is the idea expressed that both monsters are “a mated pair”; nor does it occur in BR 7.4; comp. Ginzberg, Haggada bei den Kirchenv., 16.The Apocalypse of Baruch 29.4 knows of the legend that both monsters are destined to be the food of the pious in the time to come, but does not offer any additional