Crane
Animals in the Bible
Cranes are large long-legged, long-necked birds, which are best known for their dancing displays. At breeding time especially, but at other times too, a small group of cranes will start “dancing” together, bobbing up and down, jumping into the air, and turning around. The crane mentioned in is most likely the Eurasian or Common Crane Grus grus. This is a large gray bird with a trace of red on the top of its head, and whitish cheeks. It has a wingspan of over two meters (6 feet), a long neck, and long bare legs. It behaves very much like a stork, spending most of its time walking on the ground in search of frogs, lizards, grasshoppers, and other insects.
The Song Thrush Turdus philomelos is a light brown bird with a speckled chest. Like most other thrushes, it spends a lot of time on the ground searching for insects and ants. It is solitary or lives in pairs. It has a very beautiful, complicated song made up of a combination of clear whistling notes, trilled notes, and chirps. It lives in wooded areas.
The Wryneck Jynx torquilla is a bird similar in appearance to a small woodpecker. It has a mottled coloring with a reddish chest. It feeds on ants and spends most of its time searching for them on the ground or on the branches and trunks of trees. It lives in woods and orchards.
Pictures
In the Bible
The Hebrew and Greek words for it, and every verse where each is used
עָגוּר ‘agur · 2 verses
What it stands for
It is one of the birds noted in the Bible for its migrating habits.
More about it
The occurrence of this word in is problematic, where it appears in the phrase sus ‘agur, which looks like a head noun followed by a qualifying noun, so it is the name of a single bird (a type of swift) rather than of two. The phrase is thus translated as “swallow” by NEB, JB, REB, and NAB, but as two birds by KJV, RSV, and NIV. (The KJV translators seem to have reversed the order of the two birds, giving “crane or a swallow".) In , however, all versions treat the word as a common noun, although interpreting it differently.
The interpretation in Jeremiah of ‘agur as “crane” has quite good support. For one thing the crane is one of the most obvious of the migrating birds passing over Israel, and thousands can be seen passing noisily overhead each year as they move from Europe and Asia to Africa for the winter and return again in March. They stay in Israel only for a few days and then move on. Second, the translation “crane” neatly preserves the structure and the images of the Hebrew poem. The structure here is what is referred to as a chiasmus. In this chiasmus four items are mentioned, with the first and last forming one pair and the middle two forming another: stork, dove, swift, crane. This is a common feature of Hebrew poetry. Here “stork” and “crane” are paired, and since both are passing migrants and both have long necks and legs and are about the same size, the pairing is well motivated. Third, but perhaps less important, ‘agur is the modern Hebrew word for crane. Some Hebrew scholars relate the word to the verb ga‘ar, “to cry", a reference to the noisy call of the crane.
The translations “thrush” (NIV, TEV) and “wryneck” (NEB, REB) result in a very poor poetic structure for the verse. Furthermore, while both of these small birds are migrants, their arrival in Israel is hardly noticeable, since they arrive in ones and twos and not in flocks. The wryneck is a passing migrant that stays only a short time in Israel. Even though some have argued that the song of the song thrush would be sufficient to announce its arrival, it should be borne in mind that this thrush sings mostly in spring, but it arrives in Israel at the end of autumn.
Also in Birds
Sources
Plants and Trees in the Bible, Animals in the Bible and Human-made Things in the Bible © United Bible Societies, 2025 (adapted from Each According to its Kind: Plants and Trees in the Bible by Robert Koops, All Creatures Great and Small: Living Things in the Bible by Edward R. Hope, and The Works of Their Hands: Man-made Things in the Bible by Ray Pritz), CC BY-SA 4.0; adapted for eRhema