לִוְיָתָן
leviathan
also: sea monster, dragon fuller range ↓
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Part of speech
- Noun
- A naming word — a person, place, thing, or idea.
Noun type
- Common
- A common noun — a general class of person, place, or thing (“king,” “city,” “water”), not a specific name.
State
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H3882 appears — 5 distinct verses across 3 books. Click any verse to open its interlinear word-by-word view. Verse text shown in the World English Bible for context — . Each verse’s Hebrew form is shown with its reference; the English is not keyword-highlighted, since the data carries no word-level English alignment. Use “Compare translations” on any verse to read it across multiple English versions. This concordance covers the Hebrew Bible; Septuagint (Greek Old Testament) occurrences are not indexed here.
Job 2 verses
Psalms 2 verses
Isaiah 1 verse
About this entry
At a glance — auto-summarized from this page’s data, not written by a person. Every figure links to its source below. This summary describes the numbers; it doesn’t interpret them.
לויתן — transliterated livyâthân — is a Hebrew noun carrying the sense “leviathan.” With only 5 verses it sits in the long tail of Hebrew Bible vocabulary. More than a third of its appearances fall in Job. It first appears in Job 3:8. The lexical range runs to 3 senses — “leviathan” plus “sea monster” and “dragon”. Each statement above links to its evidence; the full detail follows below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H3882 catalogs a Hebrew word from the Hebrew Old Testament.
These counts are not copied from any lexicon or concordance. They are computed here, from the morphology-tagged Hebrew Old Testament. What Lemma adds →
- 5
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 5 distinct verses.
- 3 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 3 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #3,040
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 3,040 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 5 occurrences in the concordance →
By section of the Old Testament
By traditional corpus
Conventional, traditional groupings — biblical authorship is debated, so this is a traditional corpus grouping, not an authorship claim. Each share is this word’s portion of its verses in that division of the Hebrew canon. Each figure is a share of the word’s 5 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 4 verses · 80%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 1 verse · 20%
How translations render this word
Counts come from each version’s own published word-to-Strong’s tagging or interlinear alignment — an approximate guide to how each version renders this word, not a word-level alignment the data otherwise carries. Because each total is that version’s own tagged count, the per-version totals vary from one another and need not match the appearance or distinct-verse counts above. These counts may also differ from a printed concordance because Lemma counts each distinctly tagged rendering and does not collapse phrase taggings into a single head-word total. This is a fixed set of word-tagged versions (KJV, ASV, BSB, ULT) and does not change with the reading translation you choose elsewhere. Each version’s license is shown beside its name below (and on Sources).
- King James Version: Leviathan 4×
- American Standard Version: Leviathan 5×
- Berean Standard Bible: Leviathan 6×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Leviathan 6×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H3882 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 2 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H3882 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 1 rendering that appears only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H3882 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H3882 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Senses in BDB
The 3 senses BDB distinguishes for this word, in lexicon order (not ranked by frequency or importance). The full entry — with sub-senses — is in the Lexicon Entry tab.
- leviathan, sea monster, dragon
- large aquatic animal
- perhaps the extinct dinosaur, plesiosaurus, exact meaning unknown
Word origin
n.m. Jb 40:25 serpent, dragon, leviathan, poet. and rare (on format. from לוה c. fem. ת + ָן v. Thes and cf. Ges§ 85, 54 Köii, p. 99 BaNB § 207 c; LagBN 205 (thinks foreign loan-word);—sea-monster = crocodile Jb 40:25; whale ψ 104:26 (v. Che); dragon producing eclipses (mythol.) Jb 3:8; fig. of Egypt as all-engulfing ψ 74:14 (‖ תַּנִּינִים v 13); cf. Is 27:1(×2) (‖ נָחָשׁ בָּרִחַ, נָחָשׁ עֲקַלָּתוֹן), v. Che Di and especially (on ל׳ in gen.) BartonTiamat, JAOS xv (1891), 22 ff. GunkelSchöpf. u. Chaos 46.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from לוה (lâvâh) (H3867) — to join.
Jastrow Dictionary
A second Hebrew/Aramaic lexicon for comparison, covering Aramaic and post-biblical (Talmudic, Targumic, Midrashic) usage that the biblical-Hebrew BDB does not. Matched by lemma rather than by Strong’s number, so a lemma may carry more than one Jastrow headword (shown separately below), and the entries cover usage well beyond the Bible.
לִוְיָתָן
- (b. h.) Leviathan, a legendary sea-animal reserved, with B’hemoth, for the righteous in the hereafter. Lev. R. s. 13, v. בְּהֵמוֹת. Lev. R. s. 22, end. Ab. Zar. 3ᵇ; a. fr.—M. Kat. 25ᵇ (in a wailing song) ל׳ a great man, opp. דגי רקק the fish of the swamp, common humanity (v. אֵזוֹב).
A Dictionary of the Targumim, the Talmud Babli and Yerushalmi, and the Midrashic Literature (Marcus Jastrow; London, Luzac, 1903) — Public Domain. Digitized via Sefaria. Digitized via Sefaria. Full attribution on Sources.
Forms in the corpus
The 6 distinct written forms H3882 takes in the Hebrew Bible, most frequent first — each parse links to that state’s occurrences in the concordance. Hebrew forms include their vowel points and cantillation, so a single lemma takes many written forms.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| לִ֝וְיָתָ֗ן | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Psalms 104:26 | 1 |
| לִוְיָתָ֑ן | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Psalms 74:14 | 1 |
| לִוְיָתָ֔ן | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Isaiah 27:1 | 1 |
| לִוְיָתָ֣ן | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Job 41:1 | 1 |
| לִוְיָתָֽן | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Job 3:8 | 1 |
| לִוְיָתָן֙ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Isaiah 27:1 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H3882, grouped by Strong’s listed origin. These share a root / origin per the lexicon — not necessarily a shared meaning. Each links to that word’s own entry.
Derives from
Shares the same root
Proper names from this root
People and places named from this root — a name, not an additional meaning of the word.
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 5 — not the complete family. 1 of the same-root words is a proper name (a person or place). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 4 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 5 Hebrew verses it occurs in. You can read those verses in Greek by switching the Old Testament edition to the Septuagint.
Read these verses in the Septuagint
This is a verse-level parallel only — the same verses exist in both the Hebrew and Greek Old Testaments. No word-level Hebrew↔Greek correspondence is claimed: the data carries no such alignment, so no Greek word is shown as this Hebrew word’s translation. Coverage is not total — the Septuagint omits the deuterocanon and renumbers the Psalms, so some Hebrew verses have no direct Greek parallel.
