We occasionally discuss Biblical cruxes (e.g., Daughter of Greed), and there’s a good one at Poemas del río Wang; the post begins:
I introduced the Jewish epilogue of the post on Saint Martin and his geese with this image, which, with its depiction of a goose-like bird and a signature unmistakably Jewish, proved perfect to illustrate the peculiar story of the Jews who delivered roast geese to the Habsburg emperor on Saint Martin’s Day.
But what exactly is this bird with that enormous egg?
The inscription only reads: זה עוף שקורין אותו בר יוכני zeh ʿof she-qorin oto Bar Yochnei, that is, “This is the bird called Bar Yochnei.”
All that remains is to figure out which bird is called Bar Yochnei.
1. This name appears in the Babylonian Talmud. Tractate Bekhorot 57b amidst tales of wondrous animals and plants, mentions:
“Once an egg of the bird called bar yokhani (=the son of the nest) fell, and the contents of the egg drowned sixty cities and broke three hundred cedar trees.”
The colossal bird also shows up in Bava Batra 73b, in the adventures of Rabbah bar bar Hana whose travels and miraculous encounters would eventually find their way into Sinbad-style tales:
Once we were traveling in a ship and we saw a certain bird that was standing with water up to its ankles [kartzuleih] and its head was in the sky. And we said to ourselves that there is no deep water here, and we wanted to go down to cool ourselves off. And a Divine Voice emerged and said to us: Do not go down here, as the ax of a carpenter fell into it seven years ago and it has still not reached the bottom. […] Rav Ashi said: And that bird is called ziz sadai, as it is written: “I know all the fowls of the mountains; and the ziz sadai is Mine” (Psalms 50:11).
The mere existence of such a bird is miraculous enough—but two of them? That would be an even greater miracle. Later Talmudic commentators—implicitly the medieval Yalkut Shimoni, explicitly the Maharsha (1555–1631) of Poland in his commentary on Bekhorot 57b—identified the two as one and the same.
2. We have thus learned that Bar Yochnei and the ziz sadai are one and the same. But what is the ziz sadai?
The post goes on to cite Psalm 50, Rashi (“who derived ziz from the verb zuz, meaning ‘to move about’”), and other early commentators, saying:
Thus, the three creatures—Behemoth, Leviathan, and the ziz sadai—form a coherent triad. They are three gigantic, wondrous beings, far beyond human dimensions, yet Adonai maintains dominion over them. According to Talmudic commentators, Behemoth is the wonder of the land, Leviathan the wonder of the sea, and Ziz Sadai the wonder of the air, as it is a colossal bird.
As for Leviathan, we have already noted that it originates from ancient Near Eastern creation myths, well known to the Jews living in Babylonian exile, and woven into their own mythology. During the Second Temple period, the strict priestly editors purged these myths from the Torah in its officially compiled form, yet traces remained in poetic or anecdotal texts, such as the Psalms or the Book of Job.
The central theme of these creation narratives is that the god or gods—Elil, or later Marduk, who replaced him—must first subdue chaos and its rebellious rulers, primarily in the waters, but also on land and in the air. […]
All of this is explored in detail by Nini Wazana of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in “Anzu and Ziz: Great Mythical Birds in Ancient Near Eastern, Biblical, and Rabbinic Traditions” Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society 31 (2009).
That Anzu indeed made it into the psalm, surviving there for three thousand years under the name ziz sadai, is further confirmed by the fact that the word saday—a hapax legomenon appearing only here in the Bible, with an uncertain meaning—derives from Anzu/Imdugud’s original Akkadian epithet šadû, meaning “mountain.” For Mesopotamia, mountains were the threatening unknown, the source of attackers and storms, whose deity was Anzu.
There’s much more at the link, including the usual glorious images.
שָׂדַי is not a hapax legomenon: it occurs several times elsewhere as “field” (as in “beasts of the.” ) BDB reckons that זִיז in Ps 50 means “moving things” – hence beasts of the field. This makes a lot more sense in context than giant birds. The phrase is surely meant to contrast with/complement the immediately preceding עֹ֣וף הָרִ֑ים “bird of the mountains.” “I know every bird of the mountains and the X of the field is with me”: the X here is surely not cromulently to be filled with “enormous bird.”
Cf the previous verse: “For every beast of the forest is mine, and the cattle upon a thousand hills.”
The “Behemoth” in this verse, incidentally, is just the plural of בְּהֵמָה “beast” – hence “cattle”, as often.
I’m cool with inspired mediaeval commentators finding Behemoth and a mythical giant bird in these verses as a kind of meditation around the text, but for a modern scholar to postulate that the psalmist actually really did mean to put Behemoth and an Akkadian roc in here is just fantasy.
There are quite enough genuine fascinating traces of ancient Canaanite poetic diction and themes in the Bible without making any up.
The dynamic-equivalencers behind the NIV translation go with “and the insects in the fields are mine.” Which seems a lot more focused than “beasts” or “creatures” etc., although not necessarily with any justification for the heightened specificity. Brenton is more abstract, with “and the beauty of the field is mine,” with “beauty” from the LXX’s ὡραιότης, and Douay-Rheims has “and with me is the beauty of the field,” with “beauty” from the Vulgate’s “pulchritudo.”
I suppose insects can be beautiful if viewed in a sufficiently pious frame of mind.
I don’t know, but my copy of BDB does not settle what sort of “moving things.” Some birds move more than some cattle.
“contrast with/compliment”–huh?
The previous verse, “beast of the forest…cattle” may not help.
Admittedly, I’m in a bad mood–not LH-world fault.
I suppose insects can be beautiful if viewed in a sufficiently pious frame of mind.
As J B S Haldane (perhaps) remarked, God Himself is inordinately fond of beetles.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/J._B._S._Haldane
I’d forgotten that Haldane was an actual Marxist. Pretty much a tankie, in fact (avant la lettre.)
The Kusaal version goes with suitably vague bʋnvʋya banɛ bɛ sian’arin la “living creatures that are in the uncultivated land.” The Mooré version has weoogã rũmsi “deep-bush animals.”
The NIV Genesis translation tries to harmonize the two creation stories. Untrustworthy.
I’m not a fan of the NIV myself. I don’t like intrusions of doctrine into translation even when I agree with the doctrine. (Isaiah 7:14 is a good test probe for this, of course.)
In this essay, I discuss how the words שדי and זיז could mean “breast”: https://ohr.edu/this_week/whats_in_a_word/11764
The 18th edition of Gesenius Handwörterbuch (2013) translates זִיז as “ein Insekt”, while Köhler/Baumgartner (2004) have “die Felder verhehrendes Kleintier”; In the etymological section they give “Linsenkäfer, Heutschrecke” as the meaning in Middle Hebrew and Jewish Aramatic, Arabic ziz “Baumgrille” and Akkadian zizanu “Feldheuschrecke”.
The word for “breast” is according to these two dictionaries simply an unrelated homonym.
שָׂדַי seems to be cultivated land, by default, rather like “field.” I wonder where the Kusaal and Mooré translators got “uncultivated land/deep bush”? It’s “field” in the Vulgate and LXX too.
Maybe its a local cultural thing. The Kusaasi, at any rate, are primarily cultivators, and although cattle-raising is a thing in their territory, it’s usually actually done by Fulɓe (or Mossi, in fact, at least round there.) I suppose if you’re an arable farmer, you think of animals as something you really don’t want in your cultivated fields. Nor insects either, come to think of it …
@de
French does not seem to be to blame for the Mooré, the French word is champs, more like the English “fields” than the Mooré word you quote.
Reading the RdW post more carefully, I see the “insect” possible interpretation is mentioned as having been first proposed by Rashi, but at least as described there this sounds like a speculative-yet-not-kooky guess by a smart fellow rather than evidence of any sort of ongoing pre-Rashi interpretative tradition.
If the Hebrew word (in the MT) is rather obscure is there an obvious similar-looking Hebrew word meaning “beauty” or something similar that the LXX translators and Jerome could have plausibly thought was the obvious emendation of a corrupt Hebrew text?
@PP:
Yeah, “cultivated field” in Mooré is pʋ́ʋgò (= Kusaal pɔɔg), while wèoogó is “deep bush” (Kusaal wɛog): essentially, where you go to hunt. “Jackal” in Mooré is we-baaga “deep-bush-dog.”
Kusaal sian’ar is specifically “uncultivated land.” The Bible translation uses it for “desert”, but that is misleading: you go to the sian’ar to get firewood or timber, for example. (The generic Kusaal word for “bush” is mɔɔg, which is just a specialised sense of “grass”, Because Savanna.) There aren’t any desert deserts round those parts. Mooré doesn’t seem to have a cognate of sian’ar.
I suppose insects can be beautiful if viewed in a sufficiently pious frame of mind.
Depends on whether you’re talking about insects in general, or specific kinds such as butterflies, dragonflies, and the more colorful and shiny beetles, which I think the majority of people in any frame of mind would say are beautiful. (I’m getting the feeling dragonflies are having a moment in the fashion business. Beetles had a different kind of moment there quite a while ago.)
dragonflies
(and a pious frame of mind)
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44389/as-kingfishers-catch-fire
is there an obvious similar-looking Hebrew word meaning “beauty”
The word later became rizz by rhotacism. (Or possibly by dissimilation. Whatevs.)
the ziz does have some degree of life in the folkloric tradition, as a giant bird. but not the profile of levyosn or shor habor* – i don’t remember it being mentioned as part of the messianic-era feasting in the yiddish songs i know that name the others, though i’m pretty sure that it’s on the aggadic menu.
.
* i don’t think i entirely understand the usage patterns of “behemoth” vs. “shor habor”.
If we’re in Babylonia, then this bar yokhani sounds like a roc – and the roc is supposed to have been inspired by the extinct elephant bird of Madagascar, via the Indian Ocean trade. Its eggs were indeed huge, though possibly not huge enough to drown cities.
“roc” is from Arabic ruxx, whose etymology is not immediately evident; could it be some kind of contraction of Aramaic בר יוכני? Or could the latter be a folk-etymological derivation from the same source?
If the Hebrew word (in the MT) is rather obscure is there an obvious similar-looking Hebrew word meaning “beauty” or something similar that the LXX translators and Jerome could have plausibly thought was the obvious emendation of a corrupt Hebrew text?
Yes, there is—the usual explanation is along the lines that the translators of the Septuagint read the familiar Aramaic word זיו ⟨zyw⟩ ‘splendor, glow’ instead of the rare Hebrew זיז ⟨zyz⟩, or the manuscripts in front of them even had even had the reading זיו found in a few medieval manuscripts. For instance, Jonathan Hong (2019) Eine Untersuchung anhand der Septuaginta-Psalmen 2; 8; 33; 49 und 103: Der ursprüngliche Septuaginta-Psalter und seine Rezensionen, p. 207:
See the entry in the CAL here for the Aramaic word. (As a side note, the CAL also reports the meaning ‘a type of bird’ for Syriac ܙܝܘܐ ziwā, but even if this meaning recalls our original topic of reading a giant bird into zîz śāday, it does not seem to be directly relevant. This meaning is taken from the dictionary of Bar Bahlul, which contains not only technical words drawn from a great variety of literary sources—many lost—but also medieval dialectal and colloquial words. In this case, Bar Bahlul is simply relaying information from the lost dictionary of Bar Serošway. One of the Arabic glosses on the entry is باشق bāšaq ‘sparrowhawk’.)
@Xerîb: Interesting. Thanks!
Anzu is an oviraptorosaur. Not terribly huge; very birdlike.
Twelve feet long is quite huge enough for me …
I wonder what property prices are like in Hell Creek.
The properly big version is straightforwardly called Gigantoraptor.
The correct reading for the other Arabic gloss to Syriac ziwā ‘a kind of bird’ in Bar Bahlul’s dictionary appears to be تمرة tummara ‘sunbird’, and possibly specifically in this instance, the Palestine sunbird Cinnyris osea. (Some other Arabic names for ‘sunbird’ listed on p. 240 here, for the curious.) A ‘splendor’ (ziwā) is an appropriate name for the iridescent male of this species, seen here feeding from what seems to be Anchusa strigosa. So probably nothing to do with the development of the zîz śāday legend at all.
Note that cedar is one of the wondrous plants mentioned in the paragraph before this one:
(The bold text corresponds to the original Hebrew+Aramaic; the non-bold text is interpolation, commentary, and expansion on the typically terse original)
So is the reader supposed to infer that not only were 300 cedars broken, but the cedars were all of the colossal size of the previously mentioned cedar?
The paragraph before the giant lettuce (the other wondrous plant) and cedar is about something much more mundane: the status of an animal born of a mother that dies giving birth. I’m not sure why these wonder-stories follow that topic. The person is interpolated as testifying about these practices and things in his region, and he is Rabbi Yishmael ben Satriel, from Arkat Leveina. There are no suggestions as to where “Arkat Leveina” might be. I’m not sure the vowels are correct — my own transliteration for “לִבְנָה” would be “Livna”. I note that Livno in Bosnia and Herzegovina is claimed to have been populated since 2000 BCE.
The wonder-story continues after the part cited in the OP:
So it looks like there may be three terms for a giant bird (or three giant birds?): ziz sadai, bar yokhani, and kenaf renanim.
Jastrow puts “Arkat Leveina” at Arca by Mount Lebanon.
That makes sense. Cedars are associated with Lebanon since time out of mind. *
I am wondering if, in the previous paragraph about the giant cedar, the words “נָפַל אֶרֶז אֶחָד” (nafal erez ehad) should be read as “a singular cedar fell”, emphasizing that this one colossal tree was unique in its largeness, and the cedars in the bar yokhani anecdote were thus intended to be read as being of a more average size.
Could the bar yokhani story be a mythologization of an earthquake and mudslides? The mountains of Lebanon are karst terrain; perhaps broken fragments of limestone were thought to resemble giant bits of eggshell?
_______________________________________
*: “The voice of God breaks cedars; and God breaks the cedars of Lebanon” (Psalms 29:5)
And building on this, what if the broken fragments of limestone included the fossil skeleton of an adult pterosaur or theropod dinosaur, imagined to have been what was inside the egg? “If that was the tiny baby, the mother that laid the egg must have been . . . ! ! ! !”
I sometime speculate shamelessly about geomythology.
A pterosaur in Lebanese limestone isn’t completely speculative:
First complete pterosaur from the Afro-Arabian continent: insight into pterodactyloid diversity
Owlmirror: And building on this, what if the broken fragments of limestone included the fossil skeleton of an adult pterosaur or theropod dinosaur, imagined to have been what was inside the egg? “If that was the tiny baby, the mother that laid the egg must have been . . . ! ! ! !”
I was thinking of a pterosaur too.
André Bjerke on a fabled bird of Lebanon:
I never took the geographical names to be more than a setup for an amusing sequence of sounds and some unusual rhymes, but now I wonder. The large birds of India occured in e.g. origin stories of expensive spice.
(Forgot to close the italics. Sorry!)
If I were to translate the poem into English, I would probably not be able to resist the urge to name it Mourning Bird
(Closed the italics for you!)
Perhaps someday some Norwegian paleontologist will find type specimens of a winged archosaur in both Lebanon and India, and propose Pindiapampistikopampibanon bjerkei.
(or something like that; no doubt if I err in my nomenclature, DM will point it out)
(I think I recall him mentioning that only unaccented Latin characters were permitted in names (thus, no hyphens), but if I err in that, I’m sure he’ll point it out)
I thought I remembered that there was a pterosaur taxon named after Simurgh, and I was right.
No errors detected.