Hiyya Put the Strange Starling on the Roof

The bird came into the Land of Israel in a basket, alive, because nobody was willing to kill a thing they could not name.

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It was a starling, or near enough to one that the men who caught it called it that. Gray body, dark head, a hard beak, the size of a fist. Nobody there had ever seen the kind before, so the argument started before they were out of the field: eat it or let it go. A permitted bird is meat, and meat in a poor season is a whole evening. A forbidden bird in the pot is another thing entirely, and it stays in the pot, and in the house, and on the man who cooked it.

They carried it to Rabbi Hiyya the Great.

Put It on the Roof

He looked at it in the basket. The Torah names the forbidden birds by kind, and every one of those names had been argued over for generations, since a name is only as good as the last man who could point at the animal and say it. This bird was not on anybody's list, because the men who wrote the list had lived somewhere else.

So Hiyya sent them up. "Put it on the roof," he said. "Whatever bird comes and settles down next to it is of its kind."

They took the basket up the outside stairs and set the starling loose on the flat tiles, and then they came back down and stood in the courtyard with their heads tipped back. A woman on the next roof stopped pretending to hang laundry. The tiles were hot enough to make the air over them shake. The bird walked a little, and preened, and did not fly off, and for a long time nothing in the sky came anywhere near that house.

The Raven Came Down

Then something black slid across the corner of the sky and dropped.

It came down hard the way ravens do, wings out at the last moment, and it walked two steps and stopped a hand's width from the gray bird. An Egyptian raven. Neither of them moved away from the other. They stood there on the hot tiles like two birds who had been standing on roofs together their whole lives, and every man in the courtyard understood the ruling before Hiyya opened his mouth.

"Impure," he said. "It is of that kind." Every raven after its kind, the verse says, and the verse had just walked down out of the air and folded its wings.

Somebody laughed the short laugh of a man who had nearly boiled a raven's cousin for his children. The raven went to the starling for one reason only, and the reason was kinship. Nothing else brings a bird down onto a strange roof in the heat of the day.

Let This One Marry That One

Hiyya's students did not stay with the bird, because the same principle was standing in the room with a much sharper edge on it, and one of them said it out loud.

Scripture commands that the nations of Canaan be utterly destroyed. So, the saying goes, let this one, may his name be blotted out, go and marry that one, may her name be blotted out. The wicked find the wicked. Nobody has to arrange it. Put two of a kind anywhere within sight of each other and they will close the distance on their own, the way the raven closed it, and afterward nobody has to ask how the match came about.

The men in the courtyard heard their own households in that. Everyone there had a daughter, or a brother with a daughter, and everyone there had watched some match come together in a season and had said nothing at the time.

Names That Prune and Names That Drum

The reading ran backward from there into the genealogies, where the same rule works on names instead of feathers.

Abraham had six more sons late, by Keturah, and Rami bar Yehezkel would not take their names as decoration. Zimran, he said, from the root that means to prune: his descendants would go through the world thinning it, cutting men down the way a man cuts back a vine. Yokshan he read as hardness, a line that would deal with everybody by force. Other sages heard the same two names as music and heard it worse. Zimran meant they sang, and what they sang was praise, and the praise was aimed at idols. Yokshan meant they beat, and what they beat was drums, in front of the same idols, all day.

Then Yokshan fathered Sheva and Dedan, and Dedan's sons came down in the verse as Ashurim, Letushim, and Le'umim. The Aramaic translators had softened those into trades, merchants and ironworkers and chiefs. Rabbi Shmuel bar Nahman refused the softening and said all three were heads of nations, every one of them, which is to say the line kept its weight and simply moved it into governments.

Then somebody read out the next verse in the scroll, and it was not about Keturah at all. Esau was forty years old, and he took to wife Yehudit the daughter of Beeri the Hittite, and Basemat the daughter of Elon the Hittite. Nobody in the courtyard needed that explained either. The starling had not been told what it was. It had simply stood still on a hot roof until its own kind came down out of the sky and stood beside it.