Supernal Serpent. Andrei A. Orlov, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. 4 Leviathan and the Temple A monster below, on the lef side, swims in all those rivers. He comes with his mighty scales, each one as strong as iron, and he arrives there in order to draw water and defle the place. All the lights are darkened before him; his mouth and his tongue fame with fre; his tongue is as sharp as a mighty sword until he gets as far as entering the sanctuary within the sea, and then he defles the sanctuary, and the lights are darkened, and the supernal lights disappear from the sea. Zohar I.52a For, as the nut has a shell surrounding and protecting the kernel in- side, so it is with everything sacred: the sacred principle occupies the interior, whilst the Other Side encircles it on the exterior. Zohar II.233b 4.1 Temple of Creation Yahoel’s cosmological duties that we explored in the previous chapter and their close ties to the great angel’s role as the heavenly high priest bring us to the sacerdotal dimension of the Leviathan tradition found in the Apocalypse of Abraham. Indeed, the cultic motifs play a paramount role in this early Jewish apocalypse written soon afer the destruction of the Second Jerusalem Temple amid the challenging eforts to preserve and perpetuate priestly praxis in the absence of the terrestrial sanctuary. 1 To mitigate the urgent crisis of the traditional cultic routines, the apocalypse’s authors attempted to ad- vance other sacerdotal options by envisioning now the entire creation as the 1 A. A. Orlov, Heavenly Priesthood in the Apocalypse of Abraham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) 3.