RedReplicant photostream on Flickr: “God the Father fishing for Leviathan”, 12th Century: Herrad of Landsberg’s Hortus deliciarum: 19th C reproduction drawings. In the Public Domain.

This is a very unusual depiction of God the Father using Christ, who is strung on a line of Old Testament prophets who predicted the messiah, as the hook to ensnare Satan or “Leviathan.” Herrad was a nun and scholar whose book interpreted the history of the world. It is more than likely that she illustrated the book in addition to authoring it.

Wikimedia Commons: “Destruction of Leviathan”, 1865 engraving by Gustave Doré.

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

The Statue of Liberty as a female counterpart of Hobbes’ Leviathan (Lazarus’ poem is mentioned in Auster’s novel Leviathan); the United-States as the land of the “wretched refuse”. Is this the “community of those who are without community” (“all of us, from now on” writes Jean-Luc Nancy) ? Read more about Lazarus’ poem on wikipedia.

About the exhibition From Haven to Home:

From Haven to Home is a Library of Congress exhibition marking 350 years of Jewish life in America. The exhibition features more than two hundred treasures of American Judaica from the collections of the Library of Congress, augmented by a selection of important loans from other cooperating cultural institutions. (more)

Learn more about the frontispiece on wikipedia.

Here’s another way to interpret this illustration:

The incorporation of the father on the part of the sons corresponds to the incorporation of the sons of the part of which, upon the death of the father, substitutes for him. What else does the celebrated image of the Leviathan represent, composed as it is of many small human forms wedged in together one against the other in the shape of a scale of impenetrable armor, if not the inclusion again of the murderous sons on the part of the “second” father in one’s own body? (Communitas. The Origin and Destiny of Community by Roberto Esposito, trans. by Thimothy Campbell, Standford: Stanford University Press, [1998]2010, p. 40)