a rooster: the male barnyard bird whose crowing announces the end of the night
This is the ordinary Greek word for a rooster, the male chicken kept in courtyards all over the ancient Mediterranean world. There is nothing subtle about it. It names a bird, and every Greek speaker pictured the same one.
What is striking is where it turns up. All twelve appearances in the New Testament belong to a single episode, told by all four Gospel writers: Jesus warns Peter that before a rooster crows, Peter will deny knowing him three times, and then the bird crows. Roosters call at fairly predictable hours before daybreak, so their crowing served as a clock for people who had no other way to mark the last stretch of the night. Greek even named that stretch after this bird (ἀλεκτοροφωνία), the watch Mark calls "cockcrow."
So when a Gospel writer names this bird, he is naming a moment as much as an animal. The crowing is the deadline Jesus set, and the sound of it is what breaks Peter. Mark alone reports that Jesus said the rooster would crow twice, and his account marks both crowings, though the first of them is missing from several of the oldest manuscripts.
The only other barnyard fowl named in the New Testament is the hen (ὄρνις) that Jesus pictures gathering her chicks under her wings. That word is about shelter; this one is about time.
Whether the clause reporting a first rooster crow in Mark 14:68 is original to Mark or a later scribal addition.
- contestedThe clause is original to Mark, and the early witnesses that lack it dropped a detail that complicates the flow toward the second crowing.; Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 2nd ed., on Mark 14:68; Nestle-Aland, Novum Testamentum Graece, 28th ed. (clause retained within square brackets)
- contestedThe clause was supplied by copyists so that the narrative would visibly match the prediction of two crowings in Mark 14:30.; Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 2nd ed., on Mark 14:68