Leviathan was held that God originally produced a male and a female leviathan, but lest in multiplying the species should destroy the world, he slew the female, reserving her flesh for the banquet that will be given to the righteous on the advent of the Messiah. Rashi's commentary on repeats the tradition: the...sea monsters: The great fish in the sea, and in the words of the Aggadah (B.B. 74b), this refers to the Leviathan and its mate, for He created them male and female, and He slew the female and salted her away for the righteous in the future, for if
Biblical criticism with the understanding that historical biblical criticism's focus on historicity produced a distinction between the meaning of what the text says and what it is about (what it references). This produced doubts about the text's veracity. The theologian Hans Frei writes that what he refers to as the "realistic narratives" of literature, including the Bible, don't allow for such separation. Subject matter is identical to verbal meaning and is found in plot and nowhere else. "As Frei puts it, scripture 'simultaneously depicts and renders the reality (if any) of what it talks about'; its subject matter is 'constituted by, or