StrongerBible

ya'anah

יַעֲנָה

HebrewH3284“ostrich, owl”

Appears 8 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Lev 11:16Deu 14:15Job 30:29Isa 13:21Isa 34:13Isa 43:20Jer 50:39Mic 1:8
Root family
Word studyResearch-gradeyah-ah-NAHnoun

What ya'anah means

a wild bird of the empty desert and the ruined city, traditionally identified as the ostrich

TranslatabilityPartialCertaintyContested

The word names one particular creature, and the eight places it appears come at that creature from different angles. Two of them are plain lists of species: a bird an Israelite may not eat, sitting among other named birds. The other six are poetry, and there the bird is never only a bird. It is what you find in a place where people no longer live.

The name has an odd shape. In all eight verses the word is the second half of a fixed two-word phrase that translates literally as "daughter of" plus this word, and in the poetry the phrase is plural, "daughters of." That is not a comment on the bird's family. Several Semitic languages name animals with exactly this pattern, and Syriac uses the same construction for the ostrich, so the two words together are simply the creature's name.

What ties the uses together is less a species than a setting and a sound. Wherever the word turns up the reader is meant to picture one of these:

  • open country that farming and settlement have given up on
  • a city knocked down and now stocked with animals instead of people
  • a cry that a grieving person can compare his own weeping to

Even the one hopeful passage keeps the setting: the animals of the waste land honor God because he has put water in the desert.

Two other Hebrew words are also read as "ostrich": the masculine form at Lamentations 4:3 (יָעֵן) and the puzzling bird of Job 39 (רְנָנִים). Whether all three name the same animal is itself argued over. What is not argued is the company this word keeps. In four of its six poetic verses it stands beside the jackal (תַּן), the other creature whose voice in an emptied place made it the standard picture of a ruined land.

Nuances

1athe bird itself, named in the food laws as one an Israelite may not eat
Lev 11:16Deu 14:15
1ba creature that takes over a ruined city, showing that the place is finished
Isa 13:21Isa 34:13Jer 50:39
1cthe animal whose cry a mourner compares his own wailing to
Job 30:29Mic 1:8
1da desert animal that God himself provides for
Isa 43:20

What scholars say about ya'anah

The noun occurs eight times, always as the second element of the fixed phrase bat ha-yaanah (singular, Leviticus 11:16; Deuteronomy 14:15) or benot yaanah (plural, in six poetic passages). A masculine plural yeenim at Lamentations 4:3 (H3283) is treated by modern lexica as the same lexeme, though Feliks distinguishes them. Three etymologies compete, all from homophonous roots. Gesenius (Thesaurus philologicus criticus) derived the name from a root meaning greed, connected to the ostrich's proverbial swallowing of stones and metal; BDB adopted this with a cautious question mark. Michaelis and Rosenmüller proposed Arabic waanah, hard or stony ground, giving "daughter of the desert" and paralleling Arabic bint al-ard for the hyena. Driver and Feliks derived it from anah III, to sing or wail, giving "daughter of the wailer." The three map onto the species proposals (greedy and desert to ostrich, wailer to owl) and none is decisive; no Akkadian or Ugaritic cognate is established, the standard Akkadian for ostrich being lurmu. The versional evidence favors ostrich: Jerome writes struthio consistently, the Targumim and Peshitta use naamita and nama, and Aquila and Symmachus correct the Septuagint back to strouthoi in Isaiah. The Septuagint itself alternates between strouthos and seirenes in the ruin oracles, which Papoutsakis reads as a deliberate exegetical move exploiting Homeric associations of mourning and desolate places, and the Peshitta of Micah 1:8 switches to bart yarora, "daughter of the howler." The modern owl proposal begins with Driver's 1955 study: ostriches inhabit open steppe rather than ruined cities, they boom rather than wail, they are largely herbivorous and thus anomalous among otherwise raptorial unclean birds, and they are water independent, which drains Isaiah 43:20 of force. Driver proposed the eagle owl (Bubo bubo ascalaphus), a reading Aharoni reached independently from field observation and which Milgrom (Anchor Bible Leviticus) and Waltke (NICOT Micah) follow; Feliks proposes a split identification in which yaen and renanim denote the true ostrich while bat ha-yaanah denotes the eagle owl, appealing to the fact that Mishnaic and Talmudic Hebrew always uses naamit for the ostrich. Against the owl case, the Arabian ostrich (Struthio camelus syriacus) survived in the Syro-Arabian desert into the twentieth century, Iron Age evidence for the bird is abundant (decorated eggshells at Lachish, Assyrian royal hunt reliefs, seal iconography analyzed by Keel), and Riede and Frey-Anthes note that male ostriches emit loud roaring calls in the mating season, which substantially weakens the objection that ostriches do not wail. Altmann treats the identification as undecidable and inclines toward an onomatopoeic reading of the trisyllabic name. HALOT keeps "ostrich" as the primary gloss while listing all three etymologies and noting the owl preference of Driver, Cansdale and Aharoni; DCH additionally lists "bedouin" as an option for the masculine form, following the waanah derivation. A parallel debate over Job 39:13 renanim, pressed by Walker-Jones toward a sand grouse, shows how much of the ostrich identification depends on a Christian-era reception history.

Where scholars disagree about ya'anah

Which creature the word names: an ostrich, an owl, or a bird no longer identifiable.

  • majorityAn ostrich. This is the reading of the ancient versions (Vulgate struthio throughout, the Targumim and Peshitta, Aquila and Symmachus against the Septuagint), of the medieval and modern lexicographical tradition, and of most English Bibles and critical commentaries on Isaiah, Jeremiah and Job. The Arabian ostrich survived in the region into the twentieth century and is well attested in Iron Age material culture, so there is no zoogeographical objection.; BDB, s.v. יַעֲנָה; HALOT, II:421, s.v. יַעֲנָה (primary gloss); Joseph Blenkinsopp, Isaiah 1-39, Anchor Bible (2000); Jack R. Lundbom, Jeremiah 37-52, Anchor Bible (2004)
  • minorityA large owl, most often the eagle owl (Bubo bubo ascalaphus). The case rests on deriving the name from the root anah, to cry or wail, and on ecology: ostriches inhabit open steppe rather than ruined buildings, they boom rather than wail, they are herbivorous and so anomalous in a list of otherwise raptorial unclean birds, and they are water independent. Feliks holds a split form of this view, in which the masculine form at Lamentations 4:3 and renanim in Job 39 denote the true ostrich while this phrase denotes the eagle owl.; G. R. Driver, "Birds in the Old Testament," Palestine Exploration Quarterly 87 (1955); Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 1-16, Anchor Bible (1991); Bruce K. Waltke, A Commentary on Micah, NICOT (2007), 66; Yehuda Feliks, The Animal World of the Bible (1962), 91
  • minorityThe referent cannot be recovered with confidence. The name may be onomatopoeic and may have covered more than one creature over time, and the poetic passages care about the animal's function in the scene rather than its species.; Peter Altmann, Banned Birds: The Birds of Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14 (Mohr Siebeck, 2019), §3.4; Christian Frevel, "תַּנִּים," Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, XV:712ff.
In-depth research

This is a research paper, so it may be hard to read without scholarly background. It is useful if you want to dig even deeper into this word.

Sources

  • BDB, s.v. יַעֲנָהlexicon
  • HALOT (Koehler, Baumgartner, Stamm), English ed., Brill 1994-99, II:421, s.v. יַעֲנָהlexicon
  • David J. A. Clines, ed., The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew, IV:243lexicon
  • Wilhelm Gesenius, Thesaurus philologicus criticus linguae Hebraeae et Chaldaeae Veteris Testamenti, s.v. יַעֲנָהlexicon
  • Gesenius, Hebräisches und Aramäisches Handwörterbuch über das Alte Testament, 18th ed., ed. Meyer and Donner (1987-2010)lexicon
  • G. R. Driver, "Birds in the Old Testament," Palestine Exploration Quarterly 87 (1955)article
  • Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 1-16, Anchor Bible (New York: Doubleday, 1991)commentary
  • Baruch A. Levine, Leviticus, JPS Torah Commentary (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1989)commentary
  • Jeffrey H. Tigay, Deuteronomy, JPS Torah Commentary (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1996)commentary
  • Bruce K. Waltke, A Commentary on Micah, NICOT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), 66commentary
  • Joseph Blenkinsopp, Isaiah 1-39, Anchor Bible (New York: Doubleday, 2000)commentary
  • Jack R. Lundbom, Jeremiah 37-52, Anchor Bible (New York: Doubleday, 2004)commentary
  • Willem A. M. Beuken, Isaiah II, Historical Commentary on the Old Testament (Leuven: Peeters), 299commentary
  • Yehuda Feliks, The Animal World of the Bible (Tel Aviv: Sinai, 1962), 91monograph
  • Peter Altmann, Banned Birds: The Birds of Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2019), §3.4monograph
  • Peter Riede, Im Spiegel der Tiere: Studien zum Verhältnis von Mensch und Tier im alten Israel, OBO 187 (Fribourg: Academic Press, 2002)monograph
  • Manolis Papoutsakis, "Ostriches into Sirens: Towards an Understanding of a Septuagint Crux," Journal of Jewish Studies 55 (2004): 25-36article
  • Arthur Walker-Jones, "The So-Called Ostrich in the God Speeches of the Book of Job (Job 39,13-18)," Biblica 86 (2005): 494-510article
  • Christian Frevel, "תַּנִּים," Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, XV:712ff.theological-dictionary

AI-generated word study · claude-opus-4-8

All attested forms of יַעֲנָה

f s absolute

יַעֲנָה, יַּעֲנָה

Job 30:29, Isa 13:21, Isa 34:13, Isa 43:20, Jer 50:39, Mic 1:8, Lev 11:16, Deu 14:15