Whales

Whales are created by God on the Fifth Day as part of the abundance of living creatures generated by the waters. They occupy a distinctive place in the marine order: unlike the innumerable fish that swarm through creeks, bays, lakes, and open seas, the “great Whales” mark the upper limit of aquatic magnitude and power. Their creation belongs to the same divine command that fills the waters with life and blesses the creatures to be fruitful and multiply, establishing reproduction and plenitude as central features of the prelapsarian world.

Creation and Marine Magnitude

Whales appear after the creation of the Sun, Moon, and stars and before the account turns to birds. God commands the waters to generate living creatures in abundance, and the poem names Whales first among the resulting forms. The naming gives them prominence within the sequence: they are not merely one species among the innumerable “each Soul living” and “each that crept,” but the largest visible expression of the waters’ generative force.

Their scale is made concrete through the image of Leviathan, described as the “Hugest of living Creatures.” Leviathan lies or swims across the deep like a promontory, seeming to become a moving land, drawing water through its gills and spouting a sea from its trunk. This comparison to land reverses the ordinary expectation that the ocean is an empty interval beneath solid ground. The whale makes the deep itself appear bodily and mobile, turning the sea into a realm whose dimensions rival the terrestrial world.

The Living Ocean

The account of the Fifth Day places Whales within a densely populated and sensuously active marine environment. Shoals of fish glide beneath green waves, their shining scales moving in schools that can bank the mid-sea; individual creatures or pairs graze on seaweed, travel through coral groves, display gold-dropped coats to the Sun, rest in pearly shells, or watch for food beneath rocks in jointed armor. Seals and dolphins play on the surface, while the huge Whales wallow through the ocean with unwieldy bulk and disturb its waters by their passage.

This description grants the sea more than a decorative role. It is a living system of feeding, movement, reproduction, shelter, and mutual visibility, and the Whales make its material depth impossible to ignore. Their immense bodies are not passive ornaments in the landscape: by sleeping, swimming, breathing, and spouting, they make the ocean physically perceptible as a powerful environment. Yet their agency remains part of a created order whose abundance is affirmed by God’s judgment that the work is good.

The Changed World After Sin

Later, the poem places the marine world within the larger transformation that follows human disobedience. God declares that the created world would have remained fair and good had human folly not admitted Sin and Death, while the poem describes the physical consequences as changes in the heavens, the sea, and the land. Altered seasons, violent winds, storms, pestilential vapors, and ecological conflict enter the postlapsarian order; beasts turn against beasts, birds against birds, and fish against fish, abandoning the peaceful grazing of herbs and devouring one another.

Whales therefore belong to a creation whose original abundance is later subjected to disorder, although the text does not assign them a separate act of violence or moral intention. Their presence is significant by contrast. The Fifth-Day scene presents marine life as multiplied, various, and harmoniously sustained; the later account of predation and environmental disturbance shows how that world has become exposed to the consequences of the Fall. The poem’s ecological scale thus extends the moral damage of disobedience beyond human consciousness into the relations among creatures and the conditions of the physical world.

Flood, Judgment, and Survival

During the Flood, the waters that once generated living creatures become the instrument of terrestrial destruction. Rain covers the Earth, the Ark rises above submerged dwellings, and the sea becomes “Sea without shoar,” while sea-monsters breed and establish themselves in the palaces where luxury had previously reigned. The passage does not narrate the individual fate of Whales, but it places them within an ocean transformed into the dominant medium of judgment and survival.

The Flood also reverses the earlier image of the ocean as a source of life. In the creation account, water produces and multiplies creatures; in the judgment scene, water overwhelms human civilization and erases the boundaries between land and sea. Whales, whose scale had made the deep resemble moving land, belong naturally to this enlarged marine world, where the sea becomes both habitat and emblem of the planet’s total submergence. After the waters retreat, God’s covenant with Noah promises that the Earth will not again be destroyed by flood, and that the sea will not again surpass its bounds to drown humanity and the beasts.

Narrative and Thematic Significance

Whales help establish the poem’s characteristic tension between human centrality and nonhuman magnitude. Humanity is given dominion over creation, yet the poem repeatedly represents the created world through beings whose size, number, and elemental surroundings exceed ordinary human control. The Whales are not individualized as speakers or moral agents, but neither are they reduced to a negligible background detail. Their creation receives a place in the ordered history of the world, and Leviathan’s body supplies one of the poem’s most striking images of living matter exceeding the scale of human habitation.

Their appearances also help connect creation, catastrophe, and restoration. At first, Whales testify to the fecundity of the waters and the goodness of the completed world. After the Fall, the sea and its creatures participate in a wider system of altered nature, conflict, and mortality. In the Flood, water becomes an instrument of judgment before the covenant restores its boundaries. Across these contexts, Whales remain signs of the world’s material grandeur: a reminder that the created order is at once abundant, vulnerable to corruption, and larger than the human stories that seek to explain it.