Bahamut

Also Known As: Arabic Bahamūt; also written Bahamoot, Bahemut; from the Hebrew Behemoth of the Book of Job
Region/Culture: West Asia/Middle East
Mythos: Arabic Mythology, Islamic Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: A fish of unmeasurable size who lies at the bottom of the created world and carries every layer of it on his back.
Role in Mythos: He is the lowest solid thing in the medieval Arabic account of what the earth stands on, holding up the bull, the rock and the angel above him.
Relation to Humans: No one meets him, prays to him or fears him personally, and no ritual anywhere is addressed to him. He matters only as an answer to a question people asked about the ground under their feet, and the answer stops one layer below him with an admission that nobody knows what comes next.

Go down far enough and the light stops. Below the earth, below the angel and the ruby and the bull, there is a fish so large that if every sea in the world were tipped into one of its nostrils the whole lot would sit there like a mustard seed in the middle of a desert. That comparison is not a flourish added by later retellers. It is what the Arabic cosmographies actually say, and it is very nearly all they say, because the rest of the description is a refusal: no one could look upon him, on account of his vast size and the flashing and greatness of his eyes.

The account that carries him is a stack, and it is built by a process of running out of floor. God found the earth unstable, swinging loose, so he made an angel of immense size and strength to go beneath it and put it on his shoulders, and the angel’s hands reached out past the east and the west to grip its edges. The angel had nothing to stand on, so God made a rock of ruby with seven thousand holes bored through it, and from each hole issued a sea whose breadth nobody knows. The rock had nothing to stand on, so God made a bull with four thousand eyes and four thousand ears, noses, mouths, tongues and feet, with five hundred years of walking between any two of them, and set him under the rock to carry it on his back and horns. The bull had nothing to stand on. That is where the fish comes in.

Beneath Bahamut the text puts water, and beneath the water, darkness. Then it stops, in a line with more nerve than most cosmology manages: the knowledge of mankind fails as to what is under the darkness.

The name is borrowed, and it is borrowed wrong. Bahamut is the Arabic form of Behemoth, and Behemoth in the Book of Job is emphatically not a fish. He eats grass like an ox, lies under the lotus trees in the covert of the reed and the fens, and does not flinch when a river rises to his mouth. His bones are pipes of brass. The sea creature of that same chapter is Leviathan, the one you cannot draw out with a fish hook or fill with barbed irons or bring back with fish spears through the head. Somewhere in the crossing from Hebrew into Arabic the two swapped places. The land animal went to the bottom of the ocean and kept his name. The sea animal came ashore as a bull and lost his, surviving only as a run of garbled spellings that no two authors write the same way. Edward Lane, gathering the account into English in 1883, flagged the trouble himself: one manuscript gives the bull as Kuyoothan, another as Kuyoota, and the spelling is doubtful because the vowel points were never written in.

The tower is also a late arrival. In the oldest Islamic layer there is no angel, no ruby, no bull and no name. Al-Tabari, finishing his history at the turn of the tenth century, reports the tradition on the authority of Ibn Abbas and calls it sound: God created the Pen and told it to write what is predestined, then lifted up the water vapour and split the heavens off from it, then created the fish, and the earth was spread out upon its back. The fish became agitated, and the earth was shaken up, and it was steadied by means of the mountains. That is the whole of it. The fish there is called nun, which is simply an Arabic word for a fish, and which is also the lone letter that opens the sixty-eighth chapter of the Quran. Nun. By the Pen and what they write. A cosmic animal the size of the sea grew, in part, out of a decision about what one letter was for.

The later cosmographers were more generous and a good deal more entertaining. The bull on Bahamut’s back takes a breath twice in every twenty-four hours, and because his muzzle sits in the water the sea runs out when he inhales and floods back when he exhales. When he shifts his weight the ground moves, and a great many people put earthquakes down to him, though Lane was careful to note that the more learned among the Arabs explained the tides by the moon and had no need of a bull at all.

What there is not, anywhere, is a story. Bahamut does nothing. He fights no one, swallows no one, is never hunted, never wounded, never dies. He is not even reliably in the same place twice. One telling slides a layer of sand between him and the bull. Another rebuilds the whole structure so that the earth rests on water, the water on the rock, the rock on the bull’s back, the bull on a bed of sand, the sand on the fish, the fish on a still and suffocating wind, the wind on a veil of darkness, and the darkness on a mist, with everything beneath the mist unknown.

The writers who preserved all this were not necessarily buying it. Al-Qazwini, whose thirteenth-century Wonders of Creation is the book that made these images famous across the Islamic world and beyond it, files the entire arrangement under differing opinions of the ancients about the shape and position of the earth, which is a courteous way of holding something at arm’s length. The cosmology he sets out in his own voice is drier and has no livestock in it.

Such powers as Bahamut has are wholly passive, and that is the whole of his character. He does not hold the world up by will or by strength or because he was asked. He holds it up because he is the last thing large enough to put underneath. Scale is his only attribute, and even that is not really his; it belongs to the argument he was invented to finish.

His limits are the same fact seen from the other side. A creature built to be the bottom of everything can never be given anything to do, can never be met, and can never be described past the point of saying that looking at him would not be survivable. He has no origin beyond a single sentence in which God makes him and commands him to be a support for the feet of the bull. He has no end at all. The only weakness the tradition actually hands him is a literary one, and it is severe: he is the least stable being in the whole structure, and his position, his neighbours, his measurements and his name all shift from manuscript to manuscript.

He reached English readers almost entirely through two men. Lane assembled the account out of al-Damiri and Ibn al-Wardi and the older material both of them were drawing on, and Jorge Luis Borges put the fish into the Book of Imaginary Beings, taking his description from Lane. Between them they gave Bahamut a second career considerably livelier than his first, and the name travelled on from there into fantasy games, where it now belongs to a dragon. The dragon has nothing to do with him. Underneath it, still, is a grass-eating marsh animal out of the Book of Job who got into the wrong element and was never let out again.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Bahamut in Islamic mythology?

Bahamut is a colossal fish that lies at the very bottom of the created world in medieval Arabic and Islamic cosmography. He supports a giant bull, which supports a rock of ruby, which supports an angel, which carries the earth. Below Bahamut the accounts place water and then darkness, and then they stop, saying human knowledge goes no further.

Does Bahamut appear in the Quran?

No. The name Bahamut is not in the Quran. The oldest Islamic version of the story, recorded by al-Tabari around the turn of the tenth century on the authority of Ibn Abbas, has an unnamed fish with the earth spread on its back, and it is connected to the single Arabic letter nun that opens the sixty-eighth chapter, because nun is also a word for a fish.

Why is Bahamut called Behemoth?

Bahamut is the Arabic form of the Hebrew name Behemoth, but the two creatures do not match. The Behemoth of the Book of Job is a land animal that eats grass like an ox and lies among the reeds, while Job’s sea creature is Leviathan. In the passage into Arabic the names were exchanged, so the fish took Behemoth’s name and the bull was left with a series of corrupted spellings of Leviathan.

How big is Bahamut?

The sources give scale rather than measurements. They say that if all the seas of the world were placed in a single one of his nostrils, they would look like a grain of mustard seed lying in a desert, and that nobody could bear to look at him because of his size and the flashing of his eyes. No source describes his shape, colour or anatomy at all.

Is Bahamut a dragon?

Not in Arabic or Islamic tradition, where he is always a fish. The dragon called Bahamut is a modern invention of fantasy games, which took the name after it reached English through Edward Lane’s translations in 1883 and Jorge Luis Borges’s Book of Imaginary Beings. The two share a name and nothing else.