1. Introduction

In Rebecca Podos’ recent Jewish¹ novel, titled From Dust, A Flame (2022), Malka, mother of the protagonist Hannah, summarizes The Little Mermaid in a flashback to her adolescent years. Malka claims that the mermaid Ariel “wanted to be human, and live on the land, and she did something about it.”² While Podos equates Malka’s yearning to flee her parochial hometown with Ariel’s desire to flee the sea in The Little Mermaid, this quote reveals that to be human is to live on the land. Podos implies not only that water and humanity are in tension in Jewish literature but are actively in opposition. This disparagement of water often manifests in the figure of the Leviathan, who as an aquatic mythical creature in Jewish literature has consistently serves as a recurring metonymy to gesture more broadly to an association between monstrosity and water.

Yet the perception that marginalized bodies metaphorically and physically clash and collide with aquatic settings is far from limited to Jewish contexts. When examining the relationship between Black bodies and the weather in In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016), Christina Sharpe notes, “[in] what I am calling the weather, antiblackness is pervasive as climate. The weather necessitates changeability and improvisation; it is the atmospheric condition of time and place; it produces new ecologies.”³ While Sharpe astutely excavates the complicated relationship of racialized peoples to climate, there remains a distinct lack of scholarship on how Jewish bodies relate to the natural world. Although scholars Dee Dee Chainey and Willow Winsham have begun to excavate the generative space that water provides in folklore in Treasury of Folklore, Seas, and Rivers: Sirens, Selkies, and Ghost Ships (2021) it is in a European context, which does not account for divergences in Jewish literary representations. Jewish entanglements with water merit more attention, and my research aims to address this gap in the scholarship through a focus on water and transgression. Drawing on feminist posthumanist and ecocritical scholarship to examine how Rebecca Podos as a Jewish American woman author crafts nonhuman aquatic worlds as feminist spaces of agency, my intervention analyzes the ongoing fractures and limitations between Jewishness and the aquatic by comparing biblical and contemporary literary imaginings of the Leviathan as an Othered entity.

While Jewish scholarship has begun to address that water is represents a biblical threat to godly authority (see Mara Benjamin⁴ and Rachel Haverlock⁵), it is worth reemphasizing that the common association of water and violence in Jewish literature stems from water’s existence before creation in Genesis (Genesis 1:2). Genesis’ characterization of water as a space of chaotic primordial evil is a threat to the dominant order, epitomized by the draconic Leviathan. Although the Leviathan appears in multiple other locations throughout the Hebrew Bible from the Book of Job⁶ to Psalms⁷ and to the Book of Isaiah⁸ among others,⁹ my goal is not to catalogue these instances. This piece limits itself to Genesis 1:2 and 1:21 and its spiraling myths in order to focus on the pre-existing waters as signaling the sinister, transgressively liminal Leviathan. Thus, it is not simply water’s existence before creation that fuels this monotheistic discomfort of the aquatic, but also because water is so strongly associated with the Leviathan, slyly suggesting that the Leviathan, too, could have existed before God.

To make space for a feminist posthumanist understanding of water in Jewish studies, I reckon with how this literal and metaphorical slipperiness of water permeates biblical anxieties about the aquatic in conversation with Podos’ contemporary work. By recuperating nonhierarchical forms of relation, the Leviathan transcends humanism and reaches beyond the bounded human subject through the reimagination of cultural landscapes to create aquatic ontologies. Through the beginning of Genesis coupled with rabbinic reinterpretations, I will establish the aquatic as a threat to godly authority though the figure of the Othered, hypermaterialized Leviathan. Then, I will position Rebecca Podos’ recent novel From Dust, A Flame (2022) as a contemporary retelling of the draconic, aquatic Leviathan, noting how anxieties about fluidity and the racialized, animalized nonhuman continue to the Jewish literary imagination. Podos’ success as an author¹⁰ interests me not only in that From Dust, A Flame’s recent publication illuminates what is popular in twenty-first century Jewish fiction but also in its insistent marketing as a young adult novel. Podos did not construct her work for an academic audience, but her novel showcases broader cultural trends of how Jewish fiction continues to conceive of the Leviathan. In tracing the ambivalence regarding the aquatic in Jewish literature, I argue that contemporary Jewish authors tend to employ water and aquatic creatures to embody transgressive, liberatory epistemologies which deconstruct rigid boundaries of the human and nonhuman worlds. Ultimately, I contend that in From Dust, A Flame, the protagonist Hannah’s vacillating shapeshifting that positions her between the category of the human and the aquatic reptile locates Hannah as a contemporary interpretation of the Leviathan.

2. Ambiguous Monstrosity: The Gendered Liminality of the Biblical Leviathan

The Leviathan’s authority in the water and as a larger representation of aquatic authority, as well as the Leviathan’s agency to exist without God, place tension and stakes upon its distinct depiction in Jewish storytelling. In Pantheologies: Gods, Worlds, and Monsters, Mary-Jane Rubenstein explains that God in western traditions “is said to be anthropomorphic, unchanging, rational, and masculine while the world is coded as animal-vegetal, changeable, irrational, and feminine.”¹¹ If the antithesis of God is the natural world, then water, by opposition, becomes a feminine, godless, transgressive entity in western literary and cultural imaginations. If European Enlightenment thought configures the “Human” as a white, Christian, able-bodied, living man, then what counts as alive and dead and male and female are essential in constructing the unstable category of the human. Drawing on Luce Irigaray, Rubenstein explains that binaries in religious western monotheist traditions attempt to erase and yet inherently gesture “toward its feminized origins. Like the Oedipal child, the Western tradition aims to make its way from the dark, maternal womb space to the father’s binding light—from paganism to monotheism, from the cave to the sky, from the dirt to the ideas.”¹² This “dark, maternal womb space” illuminates how race, gender, water, and anxieties about life and death permeate discussions of the Other, which in Western European thought is consistently the nonhuman. I thus demonstrate that water in literature functions as a cultural shorthand to signify transgressive, non-living, nonhuman, feminine presences.

While the Leviathan is not explicitly or overtly female¹³ the specters of femininity permeate monotheistic anxieties about the aquatic. On a basic Freudian note, humans are born in watery wombs. Black studies scholar Anissa Janine Wardi asserts “that our first experience of life is bathed in amniotic water at once highlights humans’ intimate connection to water and, concomitantly, maternalizes water.”¹⁴ Wardi’s focus here on the water as a necessity for human birth underscores that water and the womb go hand in hand.¹⁵ In terms of the Leviathan, in Monster Theory Reader’s chapter “Of Swamp Dragons: Mud, Megalopolis, and a Future for Ecocriticism,” Anthony Lioi notes that the Leviathan—this embodiment of water—is potentially tied to the “memory of the water dragon Tiamat, the mother goddess who is killed by her grandson Marduk in the Babylonian creation story, the Enuma Elish.”¹⁶ It is not a coincidence that in this pantheistic Babylonian creation myth, which monotheistic Judaism reacted against, that the two key creator gods were named “Tiamat and Apsu. The name Apsu, related to the Sumerian Abzu, suggests ‘watery deep’ or ‘sweet water ocean.’ Tiamat means ‘sea’.”¹⁷ Tiamat, tied to the Hebrew word “tehom,” meaning “deep” features in the second verse of Genesis in which “the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.”¹⁸ Not only does water exist before God’s creation, but if the God of Israel formed to contrast a watery woman-like goddess, then it is reasonable to interpolate that water biblically serves as a trope of Otherness, whether that be femininity or otherwise. The Leviathan’s legacy and link to Tiamat intimates potential existence before creation, which minimally associates the Leviathan with primordial chaos, an authority before and perhaps greater than the God of Israel. Much like Toni Morrison argues in Playing in the Dark that blackness props up whiteness in the American literary imagination, I contend that the Leviathan is the narrative tool to which the God of the Hebrew Bible defines itself in opposition. If the Bible, in essence, represents an anthology of what people believe God to be,¹⁹ then the Bible’s consistent and defensive assertion of Leviathan as God’s foil serves as an index to what represents the Other in the Bible.

By investigating the links between Tiamat and Leviathan as opponents of the Biblical monotheistic god, then the triangulation of Tiamat’s femininity, the aquatic, and the draconic Leviathan begin to manifest. Lioi concretizes these connections by summarizing, “feminist theologian Catherine Keller demonstrates an enduring ‘tehomophobia,’ or fear of the sea and power of chaos, pervading Hebrew and Christian scripture, finally manifesting in the book of Revelation as the defeat of Satan-as-dragon and the drying up of the sea.”²⁰ The entanglement of water, Leviathan, and femininity implies that much of what monotheism defined itself in opposition to was the feminine divine. In the Dictionary of Demons in the Hebrew Bible, Christoph Uehlinger illuminates that “Old Syrian seals (18th–16th century BCE) showing the weather-god killing a serpent, often in front of a goddess, are so numerous that there can be no doubt about their figuring the prototype of the Urgaritic Yammu/Leviathan conflict.”²¹ The manifestation of the goddess in conjunction with the Leviathan intimates that the two are entangled, and that the aquatic is tied to anxieties about female power. Finally, in Genesis, Robert Alter connects “the phonetic similarity between haway, ‘Eve,’ and the verbal root hayah, ‘to live’. It has been proposed that Eve’s name conceals very different origins, for it sounds suspiciously like the Aramaic word for ‘serpent’.”²² This potential link between Eve and the serpent may appear superfluous to the conversations of the Leviathan and water, but if we remember that the serpent is the draconic specter of the Leviathan in the garden of Eden, then Eve’s association with the draconic encourages a reading of the aquatic as feminine.

In Talmudic retellings of the Leviathan, rabbinic commentaries likewise capitalize on the threat of the feminine and reveal the more-than-material hyperembodiment of the Leviathan. In the Talmudic interpretation of Rabbi Judah, biblical and monster studies scholar Timothy Beal retells that there were allegedly originally two Leviathans, one male and one female, but “God castrated the male and killed the female, preserving her in salt.”²³ The murder of the female not only excavates that femininity is unsurprisingly more Othered in Jewish patriarchal traditions, but also implies that the female is more of a threat because of her potential for procreation. In A Jewish Bestiary, Mark Podwal corroborates this rabbinic mythology, but adds that God only murdered the female Leviathan “when it seemed their offspring would destroy the entire world, God slew the female, salting her flesh for the messianic banquet.”²⁴ While one wonders what untold violent deaths occurred to these offspring, this murder of the female Leviathan regardless reads as extremely physical, and does not simply end with her death, but insinuates that her murderers will preserve her corpse with salt, consuming it at their leisure as a celebration of a new world.

The Leviathan paradoxically links old generations and new worlds, for just as the Leviathan’s material body can symbolize the new messianic age, Podwal also notes that rabbis have interpreted Adam and Eve’s clothing as fashioned “from the skin of the slain Leviathan.”²⁵ The Leviathan’s material body marks metaphorical borders, whether that be from the Garden of Eden to a new, earthly existence, or from an earthly existence to a spiritual Messianic age. In “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)”, Jeffrey Cohen delineates the power and infamy of the Leviathan to inscribe human boundaries:

It is possible, for example, that medieval merchants intentionally disseminated maps depicting sea serpents like Leviathan at the edges of their trade routes in order to discourage further exploration and to establish monopolies. Every monster is in this way a double narrative, two living stories: one that describes how the monster came to be and another, its testimony, detailing what cultural use the monster serves. The monster of prohibition exists to demarcate the bonds that hold together the system of relations we call culture, to call horrid attention to the borders that cannot—must not—be crossed.²⁶

Nonetheless, Beal asserts that the Leviathan as a threat to humanist and religious authority is not physical or communal, but philosophical and individual, for the Leviathan as a figure “is a revelation not of the wholly other but of a repressed otherness within the self. The monster, as personification of the unheimlich stands for that which has broken out of the subterranean basement or the locked closet where it has been banished from consciousness.”²⁷ In equating the Leviathan with the subterranean, Beal furthers the association of the Leviathan with the monstrous, barely contained, Othered aquatic.

3. Rebecca Podos’ Underwater Palace: Queering and Racializing the Leviathan

In From Dust, A Flame, Podos’ preoccupation with river demons as antagonists functions as a cultural shorthand that reflects contemporary anxieties about reincarnations of the Leviathan. Podos’ work begins with subverting limited constructions of Jewishness through the protagonist’s Hannah’s queer draconic and animalistic shapeshifting. Hannah, a queer teenage woman, begins to suddenly experience more-than-human transformations, leading her and her brother Gabe to their previously unknown Jewish family. They explore their Jewish and queer identities, but also attempt to solve the mystery of Hannah’s transformations and their mother’s sudden disappearance with the help of a young Jewish woman, Ari, who becomes Hannah’s girlfriend at the end of the novel. The story alternates between Hannah’s present adventure and her mother Malka’s upbringing, in which she fell in love with a young man, Siman. Although Malka decides to run away with Siman, he tragically drowns near a river. Unbeknownst to Malka, a draconic water demon inhabits Siman’s deceased body, convincing Malka to promise away her future child to him. Podos positions this water demon and Malka’s vow to him as the reason for Hannah’s shapeshifting. The story concludes by blaming the shapeshifting on this water demon, Jabez ben Ashmedai, to romanticize Hannah’s newfound home as a space of domestic religious comfort (the last chapter even takes place at a Rosh Hashanah celebration). Podos bases her story on a Jewish folktale commonly referred to as “The Underwater Palace,”²⁸ for her water demon abducts Hannah’s brother Gabe and her mother Malka to his subterranean castle.

Nevertheless, the tale “The Underwater Palace” has the potential to pave the way for a posthumanist epistemology. In this Prague story, which Podos explicitly retells in From Dust, A Flame, a young woman is engaged to a man whom she does not desire to marry. She has “another love, a secret love, who came to her one night a month as she stood on the bank of the river Vltava under a full moon.”²⁹ The night before the wedding, she follows her lover, who turns out to be a water demon, under the river. The woman’s aunt eventually discovers the Underwater Palace, and finds the woman happily married and pregnant, from which the aunt didactically concludes, “[s]he knew that some shedim do love, and observe the Sabbath, and even keep mitzvot. In short, shedim can be as complicated as people.”³⁰ This water demon is clearly a replacement, a folkloric excuse to refuse this first man’s hand in marriage. In essence, the water demon represents a transgressive femininity which refuses to comply with traditional patriarchal values. I maintain that this story and its retelling is a posthumanist one, for it is about a woman who employs the nonhuman, marginalized aquatic world to escape patriarchal, humanist norms.

Podos’ own version of “The Underwater Palace” likewise affords posthumanist readings. Hannah observes that in Jabez ben Ashmedai’s aquatic castle, “[w]ith no light source underwater besides the palace itself, it’s impossible to tell what time it is up above.”³¹ In aquatic spaces, linear, normative, capitalist time is distorted, fuzzy, warped, and irrelevant. Nevertheless, this appearance of monochromatic darkness neglects how human-centered that perception is.³² Even with that anthropocentric perception, there is potential in this limited awareness, for human “viewers are denied any sense of scale, perspective, or depth. The flat wall of blackness denies us any foundation, direction, or orientation toward a horizon. We hover, like the pelagic creatures, unmoored.”³³ The lack of humanist hierarchy that darkness and water afford manifests directly in Hannah’s sight, or lack thereof, since Podos’ palace exists below the river bottom, “deep enough down that distant daggers of sunlight barely pierce the darkness.”³⁴ Yet, Podos’ ending to her own novel demonizes the nonhuman aquatic world by literally and figuratively expelling the nonhuman aquatic, which is epitomized by Hannah’s final confrontation with the water demon. When Hannah says the water demon’s real name, Jabez ben Ashmedai, she performs a quasi-exorcism:

The sound he makes is of whining dogs and roaring beats, of gnashing teeth and claws scissoring through flesh, a wail of despair and fury all at once. It rises to a pitch that vibrates in my bones, sizzling my blood like a live wire dropped in water. Gabe claps his hands over his ears as we watch the sheyd disintegrate. His skin crackles and flakes. Fragments of his wings fall to the ground like dead, dried leaves, and his body shreds down to black bone, then withers to dust. At that moment, a sudden wind whips down the river, lifting the insect-like swarm that had been Jabez ben Ashmedai into the air, then into the yawning mouth of the box … In an instant, the wavering light over the river dims, surges, and then winks out for good.³⁵

The use of dogs, insects, wings and other nonhuman adjectives to describe this water demon highlights the how Othering and the nonhuman remain utterly entangled in humanist anxieties. The consistent racialization of the water demon, hyperexaggerated to the extent the narrator insists above that the water is not only racialized as externally dark, but also that internally “his body shreds down to black bone.”³⁶ Even before Jabez ben Ashmedai reveals his true animalistic form, Podos racializes Siman’s body post Jabez ben Ashmedai’s demon possession. Podos describes that the demon’s eyes in Siman’s body appear as “dark as a coal room in a cold basement”³⁷ and as “black as the bottom of a very deep sea.”³⁸ Podos potentially darkens Siman’s body under Jabez ben Ashmedai’s possession to signal to audiences that Siman’s body remains under the control of the water demon, but at the cost of equating blackness and evil with water. Podos even playfully hints at the presence of the water demon in human form through his “Dark waves just curling out from under a fisherman’s cap, and equally dark eyes.”³⁹ Riffing off that hair and waves can undulate, Podos continues to racialize and darken Siman after the water demon inhabits his body, almost suggesting to audiences that they too can find demons if they look for physically dark features.

While this analysis may appear to exaggerate the significance of blackening Siman’s body post-water demon possession, these tropes echo a long history of conflating marginalized and racialized people with the nonhuman world. I borrow from posthumanist scholar Zakkiyah Jackson who “reinterpret[s] Enlightenment thought not as black ‘exclusion’ or ‘denied humanity’ but rather as the violent imposition and appropriation—inclusion and recognition—of black(ened) humanity in the interest of plasticizing that very humanity, whereby ‘the animal’ is one but not the only form blackness is thought to encompass.”⁴⁰ Under this logic of domination, just as whiteness and maleness represent the static cultural conception of the “human,” women and people of color are consistently associated with the nonhuman, whether that be nonhuman animals or the natural environment.⁴¹ It is therefore worth pressing on the popular conflation of water and darkness and therefore blackness. The aquatic and dark demon clearly connects to Hannah’s perception of evil in this scene, and even at its most mild portrayal, Podos portrays the ocean and water as philosophically and geographically isolating,⁴² estranged,⁴³ and disorienting,⁴⁴ which anthropocentrically assumes that human contact is the only contact that matters. Moreover, the fiery title of the book itself indicates that oceanic ontologies are not welcome in this Jewish world.

It is therefore unsurprising that Podos configures Jewishness as land-based. While living in diaspora renders it more difficult to prescribe a specific nationalism, Podos seems to recognize the interplay between metaphorical roots when writing against watery, rootless existences. Reflecting on Jewishness, Hannah ponders, “I’d read about matrilineal descent in traditional Jewish law. It’s still strange to think a thing like that could be planted in me at birth.”⁴⁵ By constructing Jewishness as a seed, Podos portrays Hannah as a narrative plant.⁴⁶ Podos’ land-based, rooted language to describe Jewishness seems to anticipate and write against a wandering watery existence. Even within the story, when Hannah’s mother warns her to stay away from the river, Hannah abruptly halts to “dig my toes into the forest floor to slow myself, catch my sneaker on a root and go sprawling. I plant myself into the damp soil and the low ferns, skin scraping over half-submerged tree bark.”⁴⁷ To defend against potential danger from the water, Hannah becomes plant-like. The language of the “forest,” “root,” “plant,” “soil,” and “ferns” are Hannah’s safety against the dark, raging waters. Jewish ideological constructions of the land seem to form themselves in opposition to anxieties about a rootless, fluid existence, rather than from any inherent material connection with the land. This terrestrial response potentially anticipates how modern capitalism roots the land as central to vocation, ideology, and societal value, which renders water a slippery surface. Stacey Alaimo unearths that the “social construction of the ocean in industrial capitalism has been that of a ‘vast void,’ an ‘empty transportation surface, beyond the space of social relations’.”⁴⁸ Posthumanist feminist scholar Astrida Neimanis also agrees that abstractly “water is deterritorialized, rendered ‘placeless’ … abstract, isomorphic, measurable quantity’, all reducible to that fundamental unit ‘H2O’.”⁴⁹ Podos perpetuates these stereotypes of blankness and bareness simply in naming the river “Hollow,” which gestures to the alleged artificiality and emptiness of the aquatic. Hannah bemoans the “empty water,”⁵⁰ “empty fountains,”⁵¹ and “room after room of nothing, nothing, nothing.”⁵² This alleged hollow, emptiness of the water not only disseminates colonialist ideologies, but interestingly contrasts with the distinct physical, material overabundant presence of the Leviathan.

Just as Leviathan lore maligns the Leviathan’s over-embodied hypermateriality, the protagonist Hannah likewise negotiates what it means to be narratively and physically almost too physical. Hannah laments how she “live[s] in Gabe’s unremarkable hand-me-downs to hide a body that I barely had control over, even before it started its nightly involuntary transformations.”⁵³ Even before any supernatural occurrences claim the narrative, Hannah’s character as a legacy of the Leviathan explores what it means to be overly-embodied, too present.

Hannah’s liminal shapeshifting as not-quite-human not-quite-animal therefore situate her physically and metaphorically as a modern remnant of the Leviathan. Hannah’s first transformation alters her round eyes to serpentine “impossibly golden eyes, and horizontal, knife-split pupils.”⁵⁴ Far from a coincidence that serpents serve as the antithesis of godliness in Genesis, the snake as a symbol automatically locates Hannah’s transformations as reptilian and contrary to divine authority. Hannah’s second transformation replaces the serpentine eyes with “a wolf’s vicious, curved ivory canines [that] sprout from my gums … I scream at the sight of my reflection.”⁵⁵ By pairing “vicious” and “scream” with an animalistic transformation, Podos perpetuates that animality opposes the human, and is worthy of fright. Far from uniform, Hannah’s third transformation leaves “green-gold scales scattered across my body—a patch here, a stripe there.”⁵⁶ These draconic and piscine scales, like the Leviathan, encase Hannah’s body as nonhuman skin. Almost perpetuating anti-Semitic conceptions of demonic Jews, Hannah’s subsequent alteration replaces scales for horns, leading Hannah to repetitively dissociate, “My body isn’t my body, My body isn’t my body, My body isn’t my—.”⁵⁷ In Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology, Neimanis asserts, “For us humans, the flow and flush of waters sustain our own bodies, but also connect them to other bodies, to other worlds beyond our human selves. Indeed, bodies of water undo the idea that bodies are necessarily or only human.”⁵⁸ Hannah’s posthumanist body reverses assumptions about a contained separation between water and the human, but also reveals the animalistic and nonhuman assumptions about water in the first place.

Just as water consequently deconstructs the human body as a definitive, limited category, meaning that watery ontologies shape body politics, Neimanis inversely remarks that “changing how we think about bodies means changing how we think about water.”⁵⁹ The instinct to Other watery ways of being become narratively impossible, for just as Hannah cannot control her bodily changes, the narrative of the story continues to center her as a protagonist, which revises humanist separations of the aquatic. Indeed, the ensuing transformation from horns—which while demonic are not necessarily tied to the aquatic—to a dorsal fin definitively ties Hannah with the aquatic, non-human world. Hannah denigrates this dorsal fin as “mottled and wicked looking, just like the webbed needle-spines that run down a stonefish’s back.”⁶⁰ The lack of uniformity or consistency of the previous scales and the fins seem to contribute to the “wicked” appearance of the animalistic features.

In the most overt transformation, these dorsal spikes become wings, much like the draconic Leviathan.⁶¹ Hannah laments that “The wings that have burst from my shoulder blades and through my tank top are a burnt-looking brown, stretched between impossibly delicate bones, like a fruit bat’s. The skin is so thin that veins show through, spindly and black beneath the bathroom lights.”⁶² The colors of “brown” and “black” racialize this animalistic transformation, and the translucence of the wings literally offer neither a clear nor opaque understanding of her liminal existence, which she interprets as “hideous wings.”⁶³ Hannah’s humanism equates these nonhuman transformations, which are admittedly not societally accepted, to assume that her “body does not look right. The sweatshirt protrudes nearly half a foot behind my shoulders, fabric bulging. I can’t explain this away, and I definitely can’t sit shiva with my bulked-up waist and jutting shoulder blades, not even in the most shadowy corner. I can barely sit.”⁶⁴ Hannah’s body’s transformation renders her unable to fit into human normative bounds literally and figuratively. Similarly to how Hannah’s body materially refuses to conform to human expectations, or to physically fit into human clothing, her inability to sit at a shiva defies not only human but specifically Jewish societal conventions.

Hannah’s final transformation substitutes the noticeable wings with an amphibian tail. Hannah’s tail combines a new animal part with her previous scales, since the tail was “a scaled, skinny whip like a lizard’s that kinks and curls of its own accord … easy enough to tuck and belt into my baggy-kneed boyfriend jeans.”⁶⁵ Hannah’s arguably queer fashion choices lend themselves to disguising her nonhuman tail, but the active language of “kinks and curls of its own accord” affords the tail a dissociated agency that distances the animal-like aspects of her body from herself. It is not simply that Hannah employs animalistic language to distance herself from these transformations, but that she distances herself from these transformations because they are animalistic in the first place.

The transformations between eyes, fangs, scales, horns, fins, wings, and a tail all add up to a draconic, aquatic animal which seems to heavily resemble biblical anxieties about the animalistic Leviathan. Indeed, Podos seems to inscribe all of these Leviathan-like characteristics onto the water demon, whose true name is Jabez ben Ashmedai. When he reveals his true appearance, Hannah describes him as “a horrific creature. Long, sharp limbs and clawed feet. Jagged wings unfolding from its back, two sets of them, blotting out the woods behind him. Horns rising up to stab the sky. It is hard angles and ragged edges and hot, stinking breath.”⁶⁶ While Hannah employs the adjective “horrific,” the description ironically mirrors her own individual transformations all wrapped up at one moment in one creature as a physical amalgamation and compilation of her metamorphoses. What is horrific to Hannah is the nonhuman body, which she acutely experienced. This characterization of Leviathan-like entities as Other perpetuates biblical concerns that the watery, transgressive Leviathan will rise up and rebel against sanctioned, religious authority. Just as the water demon-as-Leviathan’s wings obscure the woods behind him, so too does Podos apprehensively suggest that water could overtake the Jewish land.

Just as Hannah’s transformations initially reshape the human body as entangled with the natural, non-human world, Podos seems to say that these transformations are unstoppable, ephemeral, and a part of Hannah’s development as a queer character. Hannah narrates how “Ari grins and winks—winks—and I’m as helpless to stop the smile that steals across my face as I am to stop a damned thing about my body.”⁶⁷ The “thing about my body,” which alludes to Hannah’s nonhuman shapeshifting, consequently ties a posthumanist embodiment to queer thought, which potentially either recuperates the posthumanist transformations or perpetuates queerness as Other. As a reminder that these animalistic transformations are associated with the aquatic, Podos’ entire framing of the erotic is narratively submerged by the aquatic. When first introducing the main river, the Hollow, Hannah has her first moment of explicit sexual desire for Ari. Hannah sees Ari’s wet form and ponders that Ari “might not be naked, but she’s left her black T-shirt and pants slung over a branch that hangs over the skinny riverbank, and her racerback bra and boy shorts don’t leave much to the imagination. The sight does strange and swooping things to my stomach.”⁶⁸ Hannah’s description explicitly conflates and links her erotic, transgressive queer⁶⁹ desire with the aquatic setting, especially when observing that “[t]he long stretch of her [Ari’s] legs below her boy shorts glitters with river water.”⁷⁰ Yet, Podos complicates this potentially queer posthumanist narrative with the normative, humanist conclusion at the end of the novel.

Although Podos links Hannah’s bodily transformations to her exploration of her queer identity, Podos undercuts the posthumanist potential by maligning these transformations as a temporary curse from the water demon. After the water demon captures Gabe, Hannah’s body returns to “normal,” implying a traditional notion of able-bodied human.⁷¹ Hannah’s allegedly cheery conclusion of reattaining her “normal” human body stipulates a disavowal of her nonhuman shapeshifting body, undermining Podos’ glimpse of a dynamic posthumanist future. Far from static, feminist materialist scholar Stacey Alaimo defines the posthuman as “that which was and continues to be ‘part of the world in its becoming’.”⁷² Part of why Hannah frequently refers to her bodily transformations as a “curse,”⁷³ and Ari refers to Hannah’s body as “magic”⁷⁴ is because it is ever-changing and ever-evolving. Ari’s potentially posthumanist outlook offers the possibility of not simply tolerating Hannah’s transformations, but in appreciating the non-human differences and its potential. Nevertheless, Hannah dully and doubtfully declares, “[the] tail is gone. Nothing replaced it. Does this mean that the curse is gone? That my body is just my body again?”⁷⁵ By strictly reinforcing the dichotomy of the human and non-human through the extermination of the latter, Hannah participates in a troublesome narrative in which the “ocean has been portrayed as the earth’s last frontier or wilderness, which, in terms of American mythology, positions it as the place for narratives of domination.”⁷⁶ In conquering the internal nonhuman parts of herself, Hannah seamlessly moves to subdue the outward nonhuman water demon Jabez ben Ashmedai.

If Hannah’s aquatic shapeshifting body celebrated the indefinable, unpredictable porousness of a posthuman world, then Hannah’s eventual female human body reveals how patriarchal, ableist conceptions of the human sanction her material existence. Defying humanist understandings of the body, Hannah’s continual animalistically aquatic transformations “present a challenge to three related humanist understandings of corporeality: discrete individualism, anthropocentrism, and phallogocentrism.”⁷⁷ Similarly to Hannah, Gabe returns to socially accepted styles of clothing such that gone “were the guyliner and obnoxious couture clothing; he’d reverted to chinos and tees now that I was hornless, clawless, wingless.”⁷⁸ This normative ending backpedals that Hannah’s shapeshifting was an aberration not tied to a new posthuman ontology or queerness, but tied to the malevolence of the water demon, which was evil by existing as watery, and watery by existing as evil.

Since Podos gestures to the biblical Leviathan through these aquatic metamorphoses, it is significant that Hebrew—the original language of the Bible—belongs to the villainous water demon rather than any of the protagonists. Whereas Jabez ben Ashmedai in Siman’s body somewhat melodramatically calls Malka “ahuvati,” which translates to “my love,” Malka clearly contrasts this Hebrew with her nuclear family’s Yiddish which the original, alive Siman would have heard.⁷⁹ As a re-storying of the Leviathan, it is ironic that Podos aligns Leviathan as Water Demon with godly Hebraic authority when the Hebrew Bible so insistently defines God in opposition to the aquatic Leviathan. Other than the term, “ahuvati,” the water demon also claims that Gabe as Malka’s child functions as a sacrifice even though he originally demanded a daughter since “Boy, girl, yeled, yalda—these words mean nothing, certainly not to one such as me.”⁸⁰ The use of Hebrew, a distinctly gendered language, to subversively deconstruct gender as a category emphasizes the Leviathan’s manifestation as Other. If gender is one of the most fundamental humanist constructs, in which women are positioned as nonhuman, that the modern Leviathan disregards gender constructs heightens the category of the monstrous aquatic as transgressive in the Jewish literary imagination.

4. Conclusion

My aim is not to single out Podos’ contemporary work as an exception, but to illustrate how Jewish writers’ feminism and racial politics could be ameliorated with a posthumanist praxis that deconstructs racial hierarchies and allows for more fluidity in practice and not just theory. Other contemporary Jewish women American authors, such as Naomi Novik in her retelling of Rumpelstiltskin in Spinning Silver (2018), Rena Rossner in her retelling of “The Goblin Market” in The Sisters of the Winter Wood (2018), and R.M. Romero in her similar retelling of “The Underwater Palace” in The Ghosts of Rose Hill (2022) all frame water and water creatures as wicked, perpetuating gendered and racial codes that flatten and limit Jewish identity.

The legacy and continued presence of the Leviathan as a transgressive figure provides a useful hermeneutic for reading the Other in Jewish literature, as anxieties about the racialized, feminized, queer aquatic are all encapsulated in the alleged monstrosity of the Leviathan. The potential posthumanist porousness that the Leviathan affords helps to read against normative conventions of race, gender, sexuality and ability. The analysis demonstrates how the literary representation of the Leviathan serves to highlight not only the marginalization in the Hebrew Bible and in contemporary literature through the Leviathan’s liminality and persistent materiality, but also through the Leviathan’s potential to undo conventional constructions of Jewishness. Podos’ centering of Hannah as a Leviathan-like entity through her queer aquatic shapeshifting begins to rewrite the historically vilified position of the Leviathan. Although Podos’ ending does not push for a posthumanist future for Hannah in From Dust, A Flame, Podos’ text and the biblical Leviathan myths highlight how the Leviathan as a figure and lens pushes us to reconsider how we configure Judaism in relation to the land and as opposed to the Othered aquatic.