The Ziz, the Giant Bird Whose Egg Flooded Sixty Cities

The deck pitched, the rigging groaned, and the sailors saw what looked like salvation off the bow. A bird stood in the open water. Not floating, standing, its legs going straight down into the swell like two columns, and the sea climbed only to its ankles. Ankle deep. After weeks of black water with no bottom anyone could name, here at last was shallow ground.

The Sailors Decide the Sea Is Shallow

One of them was already stripping off his belt. The water came up the bird's legs no higher than a man's calf would stand in a tide pool. If a creature that size touched bottom there, then the bottom was close, and a swimmer could reach it, and reaching it meant they could wade, rest, stop fighting the deep that had been trying to swallow them since the harbor fell behind. He climbed onto the rail. He bent his knees to dive.

A voice came down out of the sky before his feet left the wood. It was not the wind and it was not a gull. It told him to stop. A carpenter had dropped his axe into this exact water seven years ago, the voice said, and the axe had not yet struck the floor of the sea. Seven years of falling. The man froze on the rail and looked again at the bird, and only then did the scale of the thing arrive in him like cold seawater. What he had taken for shallows was a bird so vast that the whole depth of the ocean rose no higher than its ankle bone.

The Bird That Reaches the Throne

The sailors followed the legs upward with their eyes. Past the waterline, past the great breast, past where any neck of any bird they had ever plucked or eaten should have ended, and still upward, until the head was lost somewhere past the top of the sky. They could not see it. They could only hear it, faint and constant, threaded through the high air above the clouds. The thing was singing. Feet planted on the floor of the deep, head pressing up against the Throne of Glory, the Ziz stood in both places at once, the lowest creature in the world and the highest, and out of that impossible height it sang praises to God.

The men did not dive. They turned the ship and ran with the wind, and not one of them spoke for a long time, because there is a kind of size that closes the throat.

The Egg That Drowned Sixty Cities

Such a bird builds a nest, and such a nest holds an egg. There is a country that remembers what happened when one of those eggs slipped loose. It did not crack against a branch. It fell the whole distance from a height no eye could follow, and it came down through a forest of three hundred trees and snapped them off at the trunk like a man walking through dry reeds. Then the egg burst. What was inside a single egg of the Ziz came out as a flood, and the flood spread, and when it stopped spreading it had drowned sixty cities. One egg. The people who measured the ruin afterward understood something the sailors had only glimpsed. The bird was not large. The bird was a landscape that flew.

A Bird, Therefore Kosher

Here is where the carefulness comes in, the cold practical care of people who must know what may be eaten and what may not. A bird is a bird. The Ziz has the feet of a bird and the wings of a bird and lays the egg of a bird, and a bird of the permitted kind may be brought to the table. So the Ziz is kosher. The reasoning is plain, even if the meal it points toward is hard to picture. A creature whose single egg drowns sixty cities will one day be carved and served, and the carving will not be at any human kitchen.

The Three Kept for the End

For the Ziz does not stand alone. Three great beasts were set aside from the beginning and held back for the close of all days. In the sea waits Leviathan, who was made male and female, until it became clear that if the two of them bred, the world could not hold their young. So the female was killed and her flesh salted away, kept for the feast of the righteous, and the male lives on alone. When he is hungry his breath boils the whole deep (Job 41:23), and only because he keeps his head in the Garden could any other creature bear the smell of him. Even the angel Gabriel, sent to hunt him, cannot bring him down alone.

On the dry land waits Behemoth, the size of a thousand mountains, who eats the grass of a thousand hills every day and drinks from a river that runs to him straight out of Paradise. Once a year, in the heat of the month of Tammuz, he lets out a single roar, and every animal on the earth hears it and is afraid, and that fear is the leash that keeps the beasts of the world in their place.

Sea, land, and sky. Leviathan below, Behemoth across the plains, and above them both the Ziz with its feet in the ocean and its voice at the Throne. Three plates for one table. The sailors who almost dove that day had stood, without knowing it, at the foot of the third guest, and lived only because a voice in the sky cared whether they understood how deep the water really was.