Tannin

Also Known As: Hebrew tannin, plural tanninim; Ugaritic tnn, vocalized Tunnanu; Syriac tannina; Arabic tinnin
Region/Culture: West Asia/Middle East
Mythos: Canaanite Mythology, Jewish Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: A serpentine monster of the sea whose power is the power of unruly water, capable of swallowing whole and of holding the ocean against the sky until a god puts it down.
Role in Mythos: It stands with Yam among the forces of the sea that must be defeated before Baal can take kingship, and it carries that role into the Hebrew scriptures as the dragon God breaks in the waters.
Relation to Humans: Humans never fight it and never meet it directly; it belongs to the register of divine combat, and its defeat is something they inherit rather than witness. Prophets and psalmists invoke it as a name for the empires that swallow them, so that Egypt and Babylon are addressed as the great dragon lying in its own river.

Anat counted her kills the way a soldier counts scars. On a clay tablet pulled from the ruins of Ugarit, the Canaanite war goddess reels off everything she has put down on Baal’s behalf: the Sea, the River, the twisting serpent, the mighty one with seven heads. Third or fourth in the catalogue, depending on how the broken lines are read, comes a name written in consonants as tnn. She says she bound it and finished it. She does not say what it was.

That is the whole problem with Tannin, and also the reason it survived. The word is a hook that anything serpentine can hang on. A scribe at Ugarit, compiling a vocabulary list for students working across several languages at once, set tnn opposite the Sumerian sign for snake and the Akkadian bashmu, the horned serpent of Mesopotamian myth. That equation is the closest thing to a portrait anyone left behind. No one at Ugarit wrote down what it looked like. What can be reconstructed comes from the scribes’ own cross-references and from Levantine seal-cutters, who show the storm god driving a spear into a long horned serpent while pinning its tail underfoot, an image stamped into scarabs at Lachish and Tell el-Far’ah in the last centuries of the Bronze Age. Some readings of the Ugaritic give it two tails.

Whether that makes Tannin a single monster is still argued. In the Baal Cycle it belongs to the party of Yam, god of the sea, the enemy Baal has to break in order to be king. A damaged tablet known as the Binding of Yam, re-edited by Wayne Pitard in 1998, appears to set El speaking to Yam under his several names, Nahar the River among them, with Tunnanu attached to him closely enough that a minority of scholars read the whole thing as one being wearing different masks. Most do not. Others suspect tnn was never a proper name at all but a class word, the way dragon is a class word, and that every serpentine horror in the Ugaritic corpus could be called one.

The clearest picture of what it does when nobody is fighting it comes, of all places, from an Israelite prophet centuries later. Ezekiel looks at the Pharaoh of Egypt and sees the great tannin stretched out in the middle of its own channels, warm silt banked along its flanks, saying: the river is mine, I made it. That is the creature at rest. It occupies water and it claims water, and the water goes still and brackish around it.

Where it came from depends on which library you are standing in. The Ugaritic texts do not bother with an origin. The sea simply has things in it, and they are older than the storm. The Hebrew scriptures make a decision, and it is a startling one. Genesis places the tanninim on the fifth day, created by God along with the fish and the birds, named before anything else that swims. The chaos dragon is demoted to livestock in a single clause.

The older story leaks through anyway. Psalm 74 remembers a God who split the sea by his strength and shattered the heads of the tanninim on the water, then fed the pieces to creatures of the desert. Isaiah calls on the arm of the Lord to wake and do it again, to cut Rahab in pieces and run the tannin through, and promises that on an appointed day the sword will come out once more for the dragon that is in the sea. The verbs are the same verbs Anat used. The monster has changed employers, not character.

Once it appears indoors. Aaron throws down his staff in front of Pharaoh and it becomes a tannin on the flagstones. The court magicians throw down theirs and get the same result, a floor of writhing staffs, and then Aaron’s swallows all of them. The scene is staged for a royal audience and it plays as one: the thing that eats other dragons has come to Egypt on an errand.

Its abilities follow from what it is, which is water with a will. It swells the sea and holds it against the sky, and in the oldest layer of the tradition the storm god cannot be king until it is put down. It swallows, which is its signature act, so that Jeremiah can accuse Nebuchadnezzar of gulping Jerusalem down like a tannin and having to be made to bring the city back up. It is venomous by proverb, the wine of enemies in the Song of Moses being compared to the poison of tanninim. And it persists. No defeat in these texts is ever quite final, which is why each generation of the poetry has to kill it again.

Its limits are just as consistent. It can be bound. Anat does not simply kill it, she ties it, and the language of muzzling and leashing runs right through the Ugaritic material, which suggests a danger that was containable rather than absolute. Job, arguing with God about being watched, asks whether he is the sea, or the tannin, that a guard should be set over him. A guard implies a cage. It can be pierced by a weapon held in one hand, and the sky always beats the water, never the reverse. Above all it is subject to being written down. The most effective weapon ever used against Tannin was Genesis, which put it in a list of animals.

The word outlived the beast. It travelled into Syriac as tannina and into Arabic as tinnin, still the ordinary word for a dragon and the name of the constellation Draco. In modern Hebrew, tanin is what you call a crocodile: a real animal lying in the shallows with its own channels around it, saying nothing.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Tannin in Canaanite and Hebrew mythology?

Tannin is a sea dragon of the ancient Levant, written tnn in Ugaritic and tannin in Hebrew. In the Ugaritic texts from Ugarit it belongs to the forces of Yam, the sea god, and the goddess Anat boasts of binding and destroying it. In the Hebrew Bible the same word covers sea monsters generally and names the chaos dragon that God defeats in the waters.

Is Tannin the same creature as Leviathan?

Not exactly, though the two heavily overlap. Tannin, Lotan and Leviathan appear together in the same poetic lines in both Ugaritic and Hebrew texts, and scholars still disagree over whether three separate monsters are meant or alternative names for one. Tannin is the broadest of the three terms, and in Hebrew it often works as a general word for a sea monster rather than a single named individual.

What does Tannin look like?

No ancient source gives a full description of Tannin. A Ugaritic scribal vocabulary equates tnn with the Sumerian sign for serpent and with the Akkadian bashmu, the horned serpent, and Levantine seals of the same period show the storm god spearing a long horned sea snake. Some readings of the Ugaritic give Tannin two tails.

How was Tannin defeated?

By binding as much as by killing. Anat claims in the Baal Cycle that she bound Tunnanu and finished him, and the Ugaritic material repeatedly uses the vocabulary of muzzling and leashing. In the Hebrew Bible God shatters the heads of the tanninim in the water, runs the tannin through in Isaiah, and in Job is described as setting a guard over it.

Where does Tannin appear in the Bible?

The word appears fourteen times in the Hebrew Bible. Tannin is the sea creature made on the fifth day in Genesis, the serpent that Aaron’s staff becomes before Pharaoh in Exodus, the monster whose heads God breaks in Psalm 74, and the dragon of the sea to be slain in Isaiah 27. Ezekiel applies the name to Pharaoh and Jeremiah to Nebuchadnezzar.