Psalm 74:12-14 and Psalm 89:6-11 depict God crushing the heads of Leviathan/Rahab and ruling the raging sea — closely paralleling the Babylonian Tiamat (Enuma Elish) and Canaanite Yam/Mot combat myths, suggesting the biblical authors originally shared an ANE cosmology in which creation resulted from an actual battle among comparably matched divine powers.

The parallel is real and well-established — Frank Moore Cross (*Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic*) and John Day's full-length monograph *God's Conflict with the Dragon and the Sea* document it thoroughly, and this should be conceded rather than minimized. But there is a decisive structural difference between the biblical usage and its Ugaritic/Babylonian sources: in the Enuma Elish and Baal Cycle, the divine combat is COSMOGONIC and its outcome is genuinely uncertain — the cosmos is causally dependent on how an actual contest between comparably matched powers turns out, and Marduk's cosmos is literally built from Tiamat's dismembered body. The biblical usage is explicitly NON-cosmogonic and UNCONTESTED. Psalm 89:11-12 moves directly from the Rahab-crushing imagery to 'The heavens are yours, the earth also is yours... you have founded them... you created [them]' — creation by unilateral ownership and fiat, not extraction from a defeated rival's corpse. Leviathan is elsewhere explicitly described as God's CREATURE and plaything, not an independent primordial deity: 'There is Leviathan, which you formed to sport in it' (Ps 104:26; cf. Job 41, where Leviathan is a fearsome animal entirely under YHWH's sovereign description and control). John Day himself — a critical, non-evangelical scholar — concludes that the biblical poets used the combat-myth motif deliberately and selectively, precisely because ANE hearers would recognize the theological point being scored: what Baal or Marduk supposedly achieved only through genuine contest, YHWH accomplishes effortlessly and without real opposition. This is the same polemical-appropriation pattern documented for Psalm 29 above, not evidence of residual belief in literal cosmic rivals.

The consistent biblical pattern — Genesis 1 (creation by pure speech-act, with no combat at all), Job 41, Psalm 104:26, Psalm 74, Psalm 89 — is that chaos-monster imagery, wherever it appears, is uniformly subordinated, demythologized, and OWNED by YHWH as creator, never independently powerful. That Israel's poets had full access to the region's most vivid combat-myth vocabulary and chose, every time, to strip it of its polytheistic ontology while retaining its rhetorical force is exactly what we would expect from confident monotheists engaged in deliberate demythologization and polemic — not from unreflective inheritors of a pantheon.