ayit

This is the Hebrew catch-all for a bird of prey. It is not the name of a species, it is what you call the sharp-beaked birds that drop out of the sky onto something. The name comes from a verb meaning to pounce greedily on a thing (עִיט), so the word describes what the bird does rather than what it looks like. It is nearly always collective: one Hebrew form covers the whole flock that arrives.

Four of its six verses paint the same picture, a body left out in the open and the birds coming down to strip it:

• Abram has to drive them off the animals he has cut in two (Genesis 15:11).
• An army is abandoned on the mountains, where the birds pass the summer on the bodies and the wild animals pass the winter (Isaiah 18:6).
• God hands an invading army over to them as food on the mountains of Israel (Ezekiel 39:4).
• The birds close in on the land God calls his own, and he summons the wild animals to join the meal (Jeremiah 12:9).

Two verses step outside that scene. Job 28:7 makes the bird the measure of far sight: neither it nor the falcon (אַיָּה) has ever spotted the path a miner cuts underground, sharp as their eyes are. Isaiah 46:11 turns the word into a picture of a man, a bird of prey whistled in from the east, long understood as the Persian king Cyrus arriving fast and from a long way off.

The distinction worth keeping is between this general term and the named birds. The eagle or great vulture (נֶשֶׁר) is the giant of the family, the raven (עֹרֵב) is one recognizable black bird, and the plain word for any bird at all, songbirds included, is different again (צִפּוֹר). This word names the class rather than the creature: whatever comes down to feed.