Eagles and vultures
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Big birds in the Bible.
"‘On Eagles’ Wings’: Comfort and Translation,The bird is most probably not cited in the Bible." WSJ Opinion (1/6/25)
A dilemma.
Rosemary Roberts, of Waterbury Connecticut, writes:
Eli Federman’s op-ed “The Bald Eagle Is Heaven-Sent” (Dec. 31) brings to mind the beautiful hymn “On Eagles’ Wings,” which is often sung both at Roman Catholic funeral Masses and at many protestant church services. While most of the hymn is based on Psalm 91 from the Old Testament, the refrain is based on Exodus 19:4, when God told the Israelites, after their flight from Egypt, that He had carried them “on eagles’ wings” through their times of trial. The refrain reads:
And He will raise you up on eagles’ wings,
bear you on the breadth of dawn,
make you to shine like the sun,
and hold you in the palm of His hands.
To me, this brings a message of comfort, love and hope to those who mourn their loved ones, and a feeling of peace and resilience for those who are struggling in a troubled world.
Leon Sutton responds:
Mr. Federman states that the Bible mentions the eagle at least 30 times. The Bible, however, uses the term “nesher.” There is serious scholarship that connects that word with the griffon vulture, the largest bird in that part of the world and a cognate of the Arabic nesra (or nasr), which definitively refers to the griffon vulture.
In ancient times, the vulture wasn’t despised as it is today and was worshiped as a god in several places, including by the Arabians and the Assyrians. It was a symbol of royalty in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia.
The bald eagle is a wonderful and fitting symbol for our country, but the eagle is most probably not referred to in the Bible.
Some translators would hold that cultural context counts as much as lexical precision.
Selected readings
- "Lexical orientation" (10/12/18)
- "Lexico-Cultural Decay" (10/9/18)
[Thanks to Mark Metcalf]
Philip Taylor said,
January 7, 2025 @ 11:15 am
"Some translators would hold that cultural context counts as much as lexical precision" — I would agree that some interpreters might legitimately hold that perspective, but surely translators should stick to translating, not interpreting …
J.W. Brewer said,
January 7, 2025 @ 11:51 am
The earliest non-Hebrew version of Ex. 19:4 we have is the Septuagint Greek, which has ἐπὶ πτερύγων ἀετῶν ("on wings of eagles"). See also the Vulgate ("super alas aquilarum"). All of which suggests that any alleged ornithological confusion may have arisen very early on. On the other hand, consider Job 39:27, which the King James Version has as "Doth the eagle mount up at thy command, and make her nest on high?" The LXX, however, has two separate birds in the verse: ἐπὶ δὲ σῷ προστάγματι ὑψοῦται ἀετός, γὺψ δὲ ἐπὶ νοσσιᾶς αὐτοῦ καθεσθεὶς αὐλίζεται, which is Englished in the recent NETS version as "And is it at your decree that the eagle rises up and the vulture lodges, sitting on its brood?"
FWIW the JPS 1917 version of that line (that version is a modest reworking of the KJV Old Testament under Jewish auspices) has "Doth the vulture mount up at thy command" etc., having changed only that one word. Yet the JPS 1917 version has ""on eagles' wings" in Ex. 19:4. Which suggests to me that maybe that set of translators/revisers believed that the same Hebrew lexeme might refer to what modern science considers different sorts of bird in different contexts?
Kate Bunting said,
January 7, 2025 @ 12:50 pm
The Bible verse that springs to my mind is Luke 17:37, given in the King James Bible as
'And they answered and said unto him, Where, Lord? And he said unto them, Wheresoever the body is, thither will the eagles be gathered together.'
Most later translations say 'Vultures'.
J.W. Brewer said,
January 7, 2025 @ 1:00 pm
St. Luke of course did not write in Hebrew and all sources agree that the core meaning of the Greek word he used (in nom. sg. ἀετός) is "eagle." But some will say it can mean "bird of prey" more generally, and some exegetical sources say things like "since eagles are said seldom or never to go in quest of carrion, [we] understand with many interpreters either the vultur percnopterus, which resembles an eagle [parenthetical citation to Pliny noting that very resemblance in the same century in which Luke wrote], or the vultur barbatus."
J.W. Brewer said,
January 7, 2025 @ 2:04 pm
This link (long to avoid a paywall issue) gives an interesting (perhaps not entirely neutral) account of a controversy about what bird or birds the lexeme should *officially* refer to in Modern Hebrew. https://web.archive.org/web/20220926061334/https://www.haaretz.com/2014-05-08/ty-article/.premium/word-of-the-day-nesher/0000017f-e944-dc91-a17f-fdcd85210000
Note btw that St. Luke may well have been expressing in Greek something Jesus said in Aramaic – and said in Aramaic while discoursing in parables about the End Times, not passing on a literal observation of a literal event. But whatever the original semantics of the Biblical Hebrew lexeme may have been may well have been different from the semantics of the cognate Aramaic lexeme as used when Jesus was speaking.
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
January 7, 2025 @ 2:44 pm
What about the Zoroastrian symbol, the Faravahar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faravahar)? I mean, it's _literally_ a guy sitting on top of the wings of a non-passerine, and Wikipedia says that it predates even the
Zoroastrians;
Does that enter into the picture at all? If so, then that's another reason to demand the extirpation of the worst hymn since "Gather Us In" (I know, I know; some people like it, but, c'mon, it starts with "Yoo-hoo!", and I can't pray and snicker at the same time).
I say we hasten its demise by requiring lexical fidelity in the hymnals — from now on, you have to sing: "…and [] will raise you up on griffon vulture's wings…"
J.W. Brewer said,
January 7, 2025 @ 4:20 pm
Next up: bold new revisionist scholarship demonstrates that Tolkien misinterpreted key Elvish lexemes in his archival sources and in fact Frodo and Sam were retrieved from Mount Doom by giant vultures.
KevinM said,
January 7, 2025 @ 6:09 pm
Also very familiar is Isaiah 40:31: "But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint." (KJV) The Bible Gateway site compares some 50 translations, old and new, but there's not a vulture in sight; it's eagles all the way down. https://www.biblegateway.com/verse/en/Isaiah%2040%3A31
Peter Taylor said,
January 7, 2025 @ 6:23 pm
Leon Sutton's claim that
does need some qualification, in that Revelation has three references to eagles and I'm not aware that it's generally considered to have been composed in Aramaic and then translated to Greek. There is also uncertainty about whether the unclean birds of kosher law (Leviticus and Deuteronomy) name both eagles and vultures. I've only skimmed the most relevant section and want to go back to read it in full, but Peter Altmann's monograph Banned Birds, The Birds of Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14 addresses this along with many other ornithological words, although without drawing definite conclusions.
David said,
January 7, 2025 @ 6:27 pm
Interestingly, the quoted article gets one word of the song (which I played at many Catholic funerals) wrong. It's not "the breadth of dawn"; it's "the breath of dawn."
Lucas Christopoulos said,
January 7, 2025 @ 9:28 pm
Jesus could speak or understood Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek.
katarina said,
January 7, 2025 @ 9:41 pm
Lucas,
Where does it say Jesus could speak or understood Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek ? All I ever learned was that Jesus spoke Aramaic and St. Paul knew Greek.
Lucas Christopoulos said,
January 8, 2025 @ 1:20 am
Here is the argument
https://tyndalehouse.com/explore/articles/did-jesus-speak-greek/
J.W. Brewer said,
January 8, 2025 @ 10:34 am
"Did Jesus speak Greek" ("did" as opposed to "could if he had wanted to," to avoid theological complications re omniscience v. kenosis) is one of those questions where people (quite understandably) want more certainty than the evidence (quite understandably) allows. One context in which the question frequently comes up is Jesus' reported direct conversations on the morning of the original Good Friday with Pontius Pilate. They are portrayed as conversing directly without the presence of an interpreter, but how confident can we really be that the Gospel writers would have definitely mentioned the presence of an interpreter if there had been one rather than omitting that as an irrelevant-to-their-point detail? Pilate almost certainly spoke both Latin and Greek, but how likely or unlikely is it that he picked up some functional Aramaic? We don't really know, and people who seem overly confident about the answer to that question are perhaps not to be trusted. We know that some substantial portion of the Jewish community of the time in the Land of Israel, and maybe more so in the Galilee than some other places, spoke some L2 Greek but we don't really have reliable percentages. We know Jesus spent some part of his childhood (probably including the key language-acquisition years) in exile in Egypt, where the surrounding language in the community he was in would have been … Egyptian/Coptic? Or more probably Greek because the Holy Family was likely to have been staying with the local Jewish community who were more Hellenized and less likely to know Aramaic? So it's entirely plausible that Pilate and Jesus could have had a perfectly functional conversation in mutual-L2 Greek, but getting from plausible to probable to certain is not necessarily feasible.
I would personally suggest that the takeaway from this theologically is that It Doesn't Matter. No matter how interesting a question you may find it, nothing much about the plausibility of the truth claims made by the Gospels and the Church actually turns on the answer. And of course there are intermediate possibilities such as that Jesus used enough of a smattering of Greek that he (and his primarily Aramaic-speaking interlocutors) understood e.g. the Peter/rock wordplay which is sort of a Greek pun, but not enough to carry on a fluent conversation on theological matters.
Of course, even if Jesus did speak Greek on occasions where it made sense to do so, that certainly doesn't mean he spoke it solely or even primarily, so any given statement attributed to Jesus in the Gospels may still (subject to clues from context) be a Greek translation of words actually uttered in Aramaic. (The current mainstream view, although there are a non-zero number of dissenters, is that the Aramaic versions of the Gospels we have are all early translations from the Greek and do not thus preserve an unbroken written-or-oral tradition of exactly what was said in Aramaic.)
KevinM said,
January 8, 2025 @ 10:51 am
Jesus dealing with Pilate through an interpreter sounds like a deleted scene from Life of Brian. So I prefer to think not.
Philip Taylor said,
January 8, 2025 @ 11:22 am
I have to say, Kevin, if ever they were to re-make that film, the addition of a mis-interpreter to the cast would be wonderful !
D.O. said,
January 8, 2025 @ 1:57 pm
J.W. Brewer, it is completely a minor point, but Hebrew version of Job 39:26-27 refers to two different birds netz (נֵץ) and nasher (נָשֶׁר). LXX probably worked from a slightly different text then the Masoretes.
J.W. Brewer said,
January 8, 2025 @ 2:19 pm
@D.O.: Thanks. It's often useful-to-vital to look at adjoining verses because lexemes may have been sequenced differently in different versions, but the "netz" in verse 26 comes out as a "hawk" in most-to-all English translations and likewise as a hawk (ἱέραξ / hierax) in the LXX, which thus has three different birds (hawk/eagle/vulture) over the course of verses 26-27. I agree that it's likely that the LXX translators were working from a Hebrew text that differed in various details from what was standardized in the subsequent Masoretic tradition.
Gav said,
January 8, 2025 @ 4:14 pm
This all reminds me of my schooldays when we would use Religious Instruction lessons as an opportunity to leaf through the Bible searching out and sharing the more interesting bits. I remember being much taken by a reference in Deuteronomy to an ossifrage. The publishers had very helpfully provided an illustration (it was a children's Bible after all) of a large, rather scruffy-looking bird, something like an Egyptian vulture or sh*te-hawk (which might be a different bird entirely). I later found out that the bird (the ossifrage, that is) got its name from its habit of breaking bones to get at the marrow, which it did by dropping them from a great height. Probably tortoises as well.
/df said,
January 8, 2025 @ 10:11 pm
Translators like those of KJV might have skewed to eagles, being from a country without vultures; had they been in California they might have found "condor" to fit. But that doesn't explain why the LXX in 3C BC Alexandria would have been confused unless the translators were so religious as never to go outside.
The bone/tortoise-dropping vulture (watch out, Aeschylus!), the ossifrage, is the Bearded one ("vultur barbatus" as quoted by @J.W. Brewer), also known as lammergeier, whose head and neck is fully feathered more like an eagle and which may also take live prey.
Peter Taylor said,
January 9, 2025 @ 3:04 am
@/df, how much would going outside help? Even with the benefit of modern optics, it takes training and practice to identify a raptor that you see a kilometre away, and a bit of luck to see them closer. And bird names are quite specialised vocabulary: people who aren't actively interested in birds might misidentify (or simply not be able to identify) anything more exotic than a dove. I don't find it hard to imagine mistranslation through failure to realise that two words weren't synonyms, miscommunication with a language informant, or semantic drift within one community.
Yerushalmi said,
January 9, 2025 @ 5:49 am
John Finnemore on eagles and vultures: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dadO5AQTohE
Lasius said,
January 10, 2025 @ 4:23 am
Another thing to consider is that the bald eagle isn't actually an eagle taxonomically. Sea "eagles" are more closely related to kites and buzzards (in the European sense) than to Aquiline eagles such as the golden eagle.
Some white-tailed eagles, the Eurasian pendant to the bald eagle, winter in Insrael though.
David Marjanović said,
January 10, 2025 @ 11:36 am
Sea eagles scavenge a lot…
Rodger C said,
January 11, 2025 @ 11:06 am
Sea eagles scavenge a lot
Adduced by Benjamin Franklin as a reason to reject the bald eagle as the national bird. He preferred the turkey.
Philip Taylor said,
January 11, 2025 @ 11:19 am
"He preferred the turkey" — which of course eats its vegan meals from bone china plates using the correct cutlery at all times … !
chris said,
January 12, 2025 @ 11:59 am
"Wheresoever the body is, thither will the eagles be gathered together." does certainly seem like behavior I'd more expect from vultures. But maybe some eagles do it too?
Andreas Johansson said,
January 14, 2025 @ 10:15 am
In Old Norse poetry, eagles (along with ravens and wolves) are commonly invoked as eaters of the slain.
Peter Taylor said,
January 14, 2025 @ 3:23 pm
@chris, eagles are perfectly happy to eat freshly dead animals which they didn't kill themselves. Dead rabbits are used to attract them to photographic hides.