Ziz

Also Known As: Hebrew זִיז, zîz; in scripture only ever זִיז שָׂדַי, ziz sadai, rendered in most English Bibles as “the wild beasts of the field”; called tarnegol bara, “the wild rooster”, in the Aramaic Targum to Psalms; later aggadic tradition also names it Renanim, “the singer”, Sekwi, “the seer”, and bar yokhani, “son of the nest”
Region/Culture: West Asia/Middle East
Mythos: Jewish Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: A bird of cosmic scale whose outspread wings put out the disc of the sun and hold off the storm winds of the south.
Role in Mythos: Ruler of the birds and third member of the primordial triad with Leviathan of the sea and Behemoth of the land, kept with them for the banquet of the righteous at the end of days.
Relation to Humans: Ziz has almost nothing to do with people beyond one encounter, in which sailors mistook it for a wading bird in shallow water and were warned off by a voice from heaven. Its cry each autumn frightens the birds of prey into restraint, so that the smaller birds survive the year.

Water lapped the bird’s ankles and went no higher, so the sailors leaned on the rail and decided the sea there was a shallow. Its head was somewhere up in the sky where they could not follow it, but the ankles were what persuaded them, and they began stripping off to bathe. A voice out of heaven stopped them before the first man went over the side. Do not go down here. A carpenter dropped his axe at this spot seven years ago and it has still not reached the bottom.

The story belongs to Rabbah bar bar Hana, whose run of traveller’s tales in tractate Bava Batra includes fish the size of islands and a desert frog as big as a fortress. At the end of this one, Rav Ashi puts a name to the bird, and the name he reaches for is a scrap of a psalm: ziz sadai.

In the Hebrew Bible that phrase surfaces twice and does very little either time. Psalm 50 has God running through an inventory of everything he already owns, the cattle on a thousand hills, the birds of the mountains, and ziz sadai is mine. Psalm 80 has a boar out of the forest ravaging the vineyard while ziz sadai feeds on it. Most English Bibles see no bird there at all, only the wild beasts of the field, whatever moves in the grass. The two words sit in the construct state, grammatically bound to one another, which is a poor foundation for a proper name; the philologist Ayelet Shveka has pressed exactly that objection. Two words in two psalms. That is the whole scriptural basis, and the rabbis built a sky out of it.

Leviticus Rabbah supplies the wings. Rabbi Yehuda bar Simon says that when the creature spreads them it blots out the orb of the sun, and he hangs the claim on Job’s hawk, which stretches its pinions toward the south. The same passage answers the obvious question about the name. It is called ziz because there are many kinds of taste in its flesh, from this one, mi-zeh, and from that one, mi-zeh, which is either fine wordplay or the oldest joke about poultry in the language.

Rabbi Meir found the whole cosmos in a verse of Job. Ask the beasts and they will teach you, and that is Behemoth. Ask the birds of the sky, and that is the Ziz. Speak to the earth, and that is the garden of Eden; the fish of the sea will tell you, and that is Leviathan. Three monsters holding three realms, and the point of the roll call is that not one of them belongs to itself.

The reason the tradition kept all three is appetite. Against the forbidden fish, God set aside a clean fish, Leviathan. Against the forbidden fowl, a clean bird, the Ziz. Midrash Tanchuma puts it flatly: in this world you ate manna on your ancestors’ merit, but in the world to come I will feed you Ziz and Leviathan, and you will eat on your own. The largest creature in the sky is, in the end, a course.

There is one thing it does that touches the world every year. At the autumn equinox it beats its wings and utters its cry, and the eagles and the vultures lose their nerve. For twelve months afterwards they hunt with less appetite than their nature calls for, and the small birds live through a season they had no right to survive.

Other names attached themselves over time. Renanim, because it sings before God. Sekwi, the seer, for its dealings with the upper regions. Bar yokhani, son of the nest, because its chicks are said to break out of the shell unbrooded and rise straight from the nest. That last name carries a famous accident with it. An egg once fell and burst, and the flood of it drowned sixty cities while the shock snapped three hundred cedars. The Talmud tells that story in tractate Bekhorot about the bar yokhani rather than the Ziz, and has Rav Ashi explain the carelessness by pointing out that the egg was addled, thrown away rather than dropped. The transfer of the story onto the Ziz is the work of later compilers, above all Louis Ginzberg’s Legends of the Jews of 1913, which gathers the giant birds of the aggadah into one continuous career. It is a splendid story. It did not start out belonging to this bird.

The Aramaic Targum on Psalm 50 makes the creature a wild rooster, ankles on the earth and head in heaven, singing in God’s presence. Ginzberg thought the Persian debt was plain, and the Avestan Vendidad does have a holy cock crowing the dawn awake and shaming the sluggards out of bed. Nili Wazana points out the obvious trouble with that: the Persian rooster calls the sun up, and this bird puts it out. A dawn herald cannot account for a creature whose signature act is a total eclipse. The Greek phoenix fits no better, for much the same reason.

Wazana looks further back instead, to Anzu, the Mesopotamian storm bird that steals the tablet of destinies and has to be shot out of the sky by Ninurta. The resemblances are structural rather than decorative: cosmic size, a date before the world was properly settled, a place in a trio of chaos monsters, and a darkening of the heavens that reads as a threat to creation rather than a weather report. Read that way, the Ziz is not a big bird. It is a reversal of the first day, kept on a leash.

Christian Hebraists found it and could not leave it alone. Johannes Buxtorf discussed it in his Synagoga Judaica of 1603, Samuel Purchas repeated the material in English a decade later, muddling the Ziz with Elias Levita’s Bariuchne along the way, and in 1698 Humphrey Prideaux delivered it to English readers as a giant celestial rooster that crows before the Lord each morning, having been given wisdom for the purpose.

Its powers are all consequences of scale. The wings function as weather. Spread, they eclipse the sun; angled south, they stand between the inhabited world and winds it could not otherwise survive. Its voice regulates predation across an entire class of animal. Its flesh tastes of everything, which is why the righteous are promised it.

The limits are stranger than the powers. The bird initiates almost nothing. It stands, it spreads, it cries once a year, and every text that mentions it does so to make a point about someone else’s authority. The psalm that gave it a name gave it in the possessive. It is scheduled to be eaten. Its one recorded encounter with human beings consists of nearly drowning some sailors by standing still, and even that had to be prevented by a voice from heaven, because the Ziz itself never noticed they were there.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Ziz in Jewish mythology?

The Ziz is a colossal bird of rabbinic legend, so large that its ankles rest on the earth while its head reaches the sky. It rules the birds as Leviathan rules the fish and Behemoth rules the land animals, and its outspread wings are said to darken the sun.

Where does the Ziz appear in the Bible?

The phrase ziz sadai appears only twice in the Hebrew Bible, at Psalm 50:11 and Psalm 80:14. Neither verse describes a bird; most English translations render the words as “the wild beasts of the field”. The giant bird is a rabbinic development of those two ambiguous words, first elaborated in the Babylonian Talmud at Bava Batra 73b.

How are the Ziz, Leviathan and Behemoth connected?

They form a set of three primordial monsters, one for each realm: Leviathan for the sea, Behemoth for the land and the Ziz for the air. Rabbi Meir drew the grouping out of Job 12:7 to 9, and Leviticus Rabbah 22:10 places all three together. All three are reserved as food for the righteous at the end of days.

Is the Ziz the same bird as the bar yokhani?

Originally they were separate creatures that later tradition merged. The story of an egg falling and drowning sixty cities while breaking three hundred cedars is told in the Talmud about the bar yokhani, not the Ziz; Louis Ginzberg’s Legends of the Jews attaches it to the Ziz along with the names Renanim and Sekwi.

Is the Ziz related to the Persian Simurgh or the Sumerian Anzu?

Rabbinic and later sources compared the Ziz to the Persian heavenly rooster, and the Aramaic Targum to Psalm 50 calls it a wild rooster that sings before God. The scholar Nili Wazana argues that this identification is secondary, because the Persian bird summons the dawn while the Ziz extinguishes the sun, and that the closer ancestor is the Mesopotamian storm bird Anzu.