By Robert Miller II

Dragons have a unique appeal–just look at their role in Game of Thrones. But dragons are myths with roots in the ancient Near East and also appear later in the Bible. They are creatures that symbolize power, but what kind?

Mushhushshu-dragon, Symbol of the God Marduk, 604 – 562 BCE, from Babylon. Detroit Institute of Arts. (https://www.dia.org/art/collection/object/mushhushshu-dragon-symbol-god-marduk-55602)

My new book The Dragon, the Mountain, and the Nations: An Old Testament Myth, Its Origins and Afterlives is about a myth—or a fragment of a myth—found in the literatures of different ancient cultures, particularly those that the authors of the Hebrew Bible and their audiences were aware of. We can trace back the origin of this myth, how it was used by different societies in different ways.

The basic dragon myth involves two characters: the storm god, usually connected with the human king of each society, and a dragon that stands for chaos but also for the sea. The myth is about a conflict between the two and the victory of the storm god, a victory that is sometimes a means of creation. But the victory is also always about why human king has the authority to rule, to bring order to chaos.

Impression of cylinder seal of a snout-nosed, horned reptile (Tiamat as a dragon?). Neo-Assyrian, ca. 900-750 BCE. BM 89589. (http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details/collection_image_gallery.aspx?partid=1&assetid=291660001&objectid=277961)

Relief of Teshub from Zincirli. (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/82/Weather_God.jpg)

We find this myth, for example among the 15th century BCE Hurrians of what is now Syria and northern Iraq, where the storm god was named Teshub. The Hurrians seem to have borrowed the myth from the Hittites of Anatolia, where the myth goes back to the 16th or 17th century BCE, with a storm god named Tarhunt. Since the dragon myth is shared both by the Indo-European Hittites and the Indian hymn collection called the Rigveda, with some of the words being exact cognates, scholars believe the myth must go back to Proto-Indo-Europeans of ca. 10,000 BCE.

The authors of the Hebrew Bible knew this story, probably in more than one version—including both the “Canaanite” Baal myth from Ugaritic texts and the Mesopotamian version, the Enuma Elish. In that famous story the challenger Marduk kills the primordial goddess Tiamat and divides up her body to create the heaven and earth.

Relief of Tarhunt from Arslantepe. (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6b/Museum_of_Anatolian_Civilizations082_kopie1jpg.jpg)

But why does the dragon-slaying myth keep being reused in so many cultures? The answer is that we should not simply think of this as a mythological story, that ancient people believed there had been dragons that their god defeated in the remote past. Instead, each society actually expresses something both “religious” and political through this myth. When the myth says, our storm god defeated chaos, it means our god is reliable, you can trust him, and he is the one who put the world in order. Moreover, at the political level, our king stands for that order. Most of these dragon-slaying myths were celebrated ritually at the New Year—in India, Mesopotamia, perhaps even Israel. Each year the trust that the chief god had brought order to the world was renewed, along with the trust in the reigning king as guarantor of that order.

Cylinder seal and clay imprint. Assur attacking a monster is cheered by a goddess. Assyria, 9th-8th centuries BCE. (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c3/Cylinder_seal_mythology_Louvre_AO30255.jpg)

So the dragon-slaying myth is a metaphor trying to say something about the nature of the universe and the political force that kept order on earth. But what is a dragon? It is a monster–but “monster” is a symbol of something unpredictable, something that is beyond our thinking, just like the sea. Many societies with dragon imagery–India, the Hurrians, Hittites, Israelites–were never seagoing people, so for them the sea was terrifying. The sea is huge, and you don’t know what’s out there, and when it (or she) gets kicked up into a storm, the result is utter chaos.

And that’s what life is for most people, existence on the verge of chaos. The storm god–and your king–fight against that chaos. Viewed another way, these myths are also trying to deal with the problem of evil; how can a god who is said to be on your side and also powerful tolerate evil in the world? Each of these cultures says their storm god is on your side, and he is fighting a tough fight. We know he will win, but at the same time, the myth is political propaganda because in every case, the human king is the representative of the storm god in his victorious aspect on earth. The king is your guarantee of security. The political implications for followers are clear.

Israel did not ‘believe’ in dragons anymore than their neighbors did. When Israel says God defeated the dragon, they use this myth in two ways. Most of the time, as in Psalm 74; Isaiah 27:1, where the dragon is named Leviathan just as in the Canaanite myth; and Isaiah 51:9, they are saying, ‘Whatever you Canaanites mean when you say ‘Our god defeated the dragon’–it’s true of our God, not yours. Yahweh, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, is the one who defeated the dragon, whatever that means.’

The other way biblical authors use the myth is to say to their neighbors, ‘Your god had to fight this battle against the dragon. You think it’s his greatest accomplishment, whatever that dragon is. For our God, it’s actually nothing at all.’ At the end of the book of Job (41:1-5), God says about the Leviathan:

Can you pull in Leviathan with a fishhook or tie down its tongue with a rope? Can you put a cord through its nose or pierce its jaw with a hook? Will it keep begging you for mercy? Will it speak to you with gentle words? Will it make an agreement with you for you to take it as your slave for life? Can you make a pet of it like a bird or put it on a leash for the young women in your house?

God is saying ‘although it is a horrible creature, I put it on a leash. For me, it’s kind of like a pet, and I can keep it in a goldfish bowl, and I play with it.’ To God, the Leviathan is nothing.

We have own primal fears: monsters like mutants, enormous lizards, or snakes that walk on legs, and of the stormy sea, with its seemingly limitless power. Today, there is also the modern twist of a friendly dragon, but that too probably derives from ancient practice, in this case from the taming of the dragons described in Job. But the myth of the storm god slaying the chaos dragon therefore has tremendous staying power (in another book to be published next year I show how the story of St. George slaying the dragon embodies the same story), and so we return to the dragon story in modern fantasy literature and film. When does the next season of Game of Thrones start?

Robert Miller II is Ordinary Professor of Old Testament at Catholic University.