Mythical Creatures
Ziz
Birds
Citation Formats
General Reference
APA Style
BibTeX
Origin A rabbinic construction, completing the triad with Leviathan and Behemoth
The Ziz is a rabbinic creature rather than a biblical one, built out of a phrase. Scripture speaks of the ziz sadai, usually translated as the creatures or the moving things of the field, and later midrashic writing reads the word as the name of a colossal bird whose outspread wings darken the sun and whose ankles reach the sky. It completes a set: Behemoth for the land, Leviathan for the sea, Ziz for the air, the three together standing for the fullness of creation and destined for the same eschatological feast. It has no independent story, no adversary and little iconography, and outside this triad it barely appears, which makes it the least developed of the three.
Facts
Origins
Origin PeriodA rabbinic construction, completing the triad with Leviathan and Behemoth 1Tradition: The Babylonian Talmud Origin PeriodElaborated in the Babylonian Talmud and the midrashim 1Tradition: The Babylonian Talmud Origin PeriodNot in the Hebrew Bible, where the word is read differently 1Tradition: The Babylonian Talmud Origin of the NameThe name comes from the biblical phrase ziz sadai, 'the creatures' or 'moving things' of the field, which later midrashic tradition reread as the proper name of this bird. 1 Attestation
HistoricityLegendary: known from narrative tradition, not the historical record 1 Legendary Meaning in the Attesting SourceGiant bird of the rabbinic triad 1Tradition: The Babylonian Talmud Meaning in the Attesting SourceSo large its ankles rest on the sea bed while its head reaches heaven 1Tradition: The Babylonian Talmud Meaning in the Attesting SourceThe passage is about the scale of creation, not a monster 1Tradition: The Babylonian Talmud Function
Domain / FunctionDomain of the air, completing a set with Behemoth for the land and Leviathan for the sea, the three together standing for the fullness of creation and destined for the same eschatological feast. 1 Cult
Attributes and IconographyA colossal bird whose outspread wings darken the sun and whose ankles reach the sky. 1 Learn More
The Bird Built Out of a Phrase
The Ziz is a rabbinic creature rather than a biblical one, constructed out of a single obscure expression. Psalm 50:11 speaks of the ziz sadai, usually translated "the moving things of the field" or "the wild beasts," but read by later midrashic writers as the proper name of a colossal bird, so vast that when it stands in the sea the water reaches only its ankles, and its wings can eclipse the sun. It completes a symmetrical scheme: Leviathan rules the deep, Behemoth the dry land, and the Ziz the air, the three great creatures of sea, earth and sky formed at creation and kept for the messianic banquet. The Ziz is the least developed of the three, appearing mainly in aggadic elaboration rather than in narrative, and it illustrates a characteristic rabbinic move: an unfamiliar scriptural word is taken as the trace of a hidden marvel, and a whole creature is inferred to fill the gap.
A Bird Assembled from a Phrase
The rabbinic scheme is symmetrical and satisfying: Leviathan holds the sea, Behemoth the land, and the Ziz the air. That symmetry is probably the reason the Ziz exists at all. The other two are described at length in scripture. The Ziz is not, and the verse usually offered for it, in the fiftieth Psalm, contains the phrase ziz sadai, which most translators render as something like all that moves in the field rather than as the name of a bird.
Once the name was fixed, description followed. The Talmudic and midrashic material gives the Ziz a wingspan that blocks the sun and legs that reach the seabed while its head is in the clouds, and it joins the other two in the banquet prepared for the righteous. The three are then read as a set covering the created orders, which is a theological argument in the form of a menagerie.
The Ziz is worth keeping precisely because its foundations are visible. Most legendary creatures arrive with their origins already lost. Here the whole process is on the record: an ambiguous phrase, a reading that turns it into a name, a symmetry that demands a third member, and a body supplied to fill the role. Illuminated manuscripts later drew it, and by then it was an animal like any other.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
The bird that completes the set for the air
Attested In
Why this is disputed. The Ziz is the sky counterpart in the rabbinic triad of great creatures alongside Behemoth and Leviathan. Behemoth and Leviathan are both named directly in the Hebrew Bible (Job 40 and 41), while the Ziz has no equivalent explicit naming there; its identification rests on a later rabbinic reading of the phrase ziz sadai in Psalm 50:11 as a giant bird rather than its plain sense of moving things of the field, which is why its scriptural warrant is thinner than the other two, and why its extended description sits in the Talmud itself, Bava Batra among its tractates, rather than in the Hebrew Bible.
Belongs to Tradition
Sources
1. The Babylonian Talmud
Anonymous (multiple authors), Soncino Press, 1935Bava Batra 73b and the surrounding aggadic materialQuote, Bava Batra 73b and the surrounding aggadic material
The great bird is described in the rabbinic material as spanning the sky, and is paired with Behemoth and Leviathan as the creatures of the air, the land and the sea.
The Hebrew Bible (Tanakh)
Encyclopedia of Religion
Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), Macmillan Reference, 2005on the rabbinic elaboration of the ZizView the Source Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.
Sign in to dispute this or suggest a correction.
View At A Past Year
The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.