Bird Calls—Clues to the Origins of Hebrew

By Martin Johnson

Background

This article is a summary of research published in the Journal for the Study of the Old Testament¹ and forthcoming in Creation Research Society Quarterly.² The first aim was to attempt to identify the 19 birds in the list in Leviticus 11:13–19 using onomatopoeia, ornithology, archaeology, and applied psychology. The second aim was to consider what that specific group of birds could tell us about the environment at the time of Leviticus. In this article we will consider some further implications.

The first challenge was to establish what birds were likely to have been seen in the southern Levant (which includes Sinai) in the second millennium BC. Then an exploration of the Septuagint (LXX) from the third century BC and the Latin Vulgate from about 400 AD was undertaken, as these were the earliest major translations of the Old Testament from Hebrew. It took a bit of juggling to align these translations with the Hebrew bird list, but once it was clear that Greek and early Latin did not distinguish between hawks and falcons, while the Hebrew (like the ancient Egyptians) did, that explained a duplicated vulture in the LXX and Vulgate lists. Pliny the Elder’s Natural History (Book 10) provided many clues to the original birds behind some Greek and Latin translations.

The results of this research clearly identified most of the birds on the Leviticus list, confirming 16 of the LXX identifications. This showed that seven of the birds belonged in wetland habitats. The Leviticus prohibition on eating them means that these were birds the Israelites were expected to see during the coming 40 years in the wilderness. Of the remainder, there were only two or three that might be considered native to deserts and mountains. Research into the climate in the Sinai and neighboring regions during the second millennium BC revealed that the area was wetter then, with savannah and woodland extending across Sinai and the Negev. This answered a lot of questions, including how the Israelites fed and watered their cattle during the wilderness wanderings. This demonstrates that Leviticus and the associated wanderings narratives from Exodus to Deuteronomy are authentic works of the mid-second millennium BC.

The Experiments

With onomatopoeic naming, the bird call is rendered into the name of the bird with some accommodations for the speaker’s language. While various languages may have similar words for these birds, they are not derived from one another, but all derive from the same bird call. The experiments involved asking a group of people to compare the birds’ Hebrew names with a series of bird calls. This is known as group decision-making, an effective tool for resolving certain “cognition” problems.³ Bird recordings were obtained from two databases, xeno-canto.org and ebird.org. Hundreds of species were reviewed in order to select the forty different species used for testing, and three surveys were conducted. The first survey used transliterated Hebrew pronunciations while for the second and third, sound files were obtained for the Hebrew names using the Tiberian pronunciation tradition, enabling sound-to-sound comparisons. Between 25 and 30 responses were received for each questionnaire, so a minimum threshold of 60% was adopted for positive responses. Anything below that was regarded as neutral or negative. The table below shows the best and worst results for each bird on the Leviticus list.

Summary for Leviticus 11:13–19 birds. Best and worst “Yes” percent scores.

Implications

Date of Leviticus

The southern Levant experienced a major climate change from wet to dry during the 13th century BC, and although there is evidence of cattle management and vegetation, indicating savannah and woodlands in that region before then, these all disappeared afterward. Liberal scholarship argues that this part of the Bible is a product of the seventh century BC,⁴ but that cannot explain why the text bans people from eating birds they would not encounter in the arid territory of the southern Levant of that century.

Climate and Environment of the Exodus

The rainfall levels reported for the mid-second millennium BC are still low (ca. 500mm/year), but enough to create wetlands in the wadi systems and savannah conditions on higher ground. This landscape would not have been suitable for arable farming, and would have been easy to over-graze, meaning people with flocks and herds would have needed to move on periodically to find fresh grazing.

Etymology

These Hebrew words with onomatopoeic correlations have not derived from other West Semitic languages but directly from the calls of the birds. For example, the Mvskoke (Muskogee) word for “hawk” is “Ayo,” very similar to bird 5, ’ayah, the falcon. Coincidence? Or more likely, they are both independently derived from similar birds.

Other Possible Onomatopoeias

Several other Hebrew animal names could also be onomatopoeias. Here are two where an emphatic stress on the middle syllable might help an onomatopoeic correlation:

• Ariy, Lion. Could that sound like a male lion roaring?
• B^ehamah (pronounced v^ehamah), Cattle. Does that sound like the bellowing of bulls when their herds are around?

Gary A. Rendsburg⁵ notes, “The exact pronunciation of the vowels of ancient Hebrew cannot be recovered.”

It may be that accurate identification of the bird and animal calls behind onomatopoeic names could help recover some of those lost vowel pronunciations.

The Call of the Behemoth?

Behemoth is considered to be “an extension of the plural of b^ehēmâ akin to the superlative in the English.”⁶ So if b^ehamah derives from the bellowing of bulls, then the call of the behemoth might have resembled the bellowing of bulls raised to a “superlative” level.

Conclusions

The onomatopoeia experiments have produced some remarkable data and also confirmed many of the most ancient translations of the Hebrew bird names into Greek and Latin. This means that these Hebrew names preserve the original forms of the language and predate the sojourn in Egypt (as these names are different from the equivalent ancient Egyptian bird names). Here is strong support for the thesis of Doug Petrovich⁷ that the Hebrew language was in use (in ancient Egypt) long before the Exodus. In fact, the findings indicate it could go back long before, to when these animals were first named.

Endnotes

¹ Martin Johnson and Philip Jenson, “An Attempt to Identify the Birds of Leviticus 11.13–19 Using Onomatopoeia,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 48, no. 2. (December 2023): 208–28, https://doi.org/10.1177/03090892231188742.

² Martin Johnson, “The Climate and Environment of the Exodus; Clues from the Birds of Leviticus 11:13-19,” Creation Research Society Quarterly 61 (forthcoming). Publication due late 2024 or early 2025.

³ James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies, and Nations (London: Abacus, 2004).

⁴ For example, Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts (New York: Free Press, 2001).

⁵ “Phonology: Biblical Hebrew,” in Encyclopedia of Hebrew Language and Linguistics, edited by Geoffrey Khan, associate editors Shmuel Bolokzy, Steven E. Fassberg, Gary A. Rendsburg, Aaron D. Rubin, Ora R. Schwarzwald, and Tamar Zewi, vol. 3 of 4, P–Z (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 105.

⁶ R. Laird Harris, Gleason L. Archer Jr., and Bruce K. Waltke, eds., Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (Chicago: Moody Press, 1980), 1:93.

⁷ The World’s Oldest Alphabet: Hebrew as the Language of the Proto-consonantal Script, with a contribution by Sarah K. Doherty and an introduction by Eugene H. Merrill (Jerusalem: Carta Jerusalem, 2016).

Bibliography

Finkelstein, Israel, and Neil Asher Silberman. The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts. New York: Free Press, 2001.

Harris, R. Laird, Gleason L. Archer Jr., and Brucke K. Waltke, eds. Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament. 2 vols. Chicago: Moody Press, 1980.

Johnson, Martin. “The Climate and Environment of the Exodus; Clues from the Birds of Leviticus 11:13-19.” Creation Research Society Quarterly 61 (forthcoming).

Johnson, Martin, and Philip Jenson. “An Attempt to Identify the Birds of Leviticus 11.13–19 Using Onomatopoeia.” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 48, no. 2. (December 2023): 208–28. https://doi.org/10.1177/03090892231188742.

Petrovich, Doug. The World’s Oldest Alphabet: Hebrew as the Language of the Proto-consonantal Script. With a contribution by Sarah K. Doherty and an introduction by Eugene H. Merrill. Jerusalem: Carta Jerusalem, 2016.

Rendsburg, Gary A. “Phonology: Biblical Hebrew.” In Encyclopedia of Hebrew Language and Linguistics, edited by Geoffrey Khan, associate editors Shmuel Bolokzy, Steven E. Fassberg, Gary A. Rendsburg, Aaron D. Rubin, Ora R. Schwarzwald, and Tamar Zewi. Vol. 3 of 4, P–Z, 100–109. Leiden: Brill, 2013.

Surowiecki, James. The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies, and Nations. London: Abacus, 2004.