Creation

Back in the fifth century BCE, Ezra and Nehemiah, while composing the Torah, may have purged from it the Babylonian and Canaanite creation myths. Yet the vanquished stars of those tales—Leviathan, Behemoth, and the Ziz bird—found a cozy refuge in poetry, the Psalms, the Book of Job, and the rabbinic tradition that interprets them. And there they’ve been quietly thriving for three thousand years.

Beneath each scene of the Creation and the episodes of first men’s story, are four quadrilobe panels with four grotesque creatures, on each of the twice ten pillars