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Our daf asks: Even if we claim that the measure for impure foods is an egg-bulk, one could say it is referring to the giant egg-bulk of the bird called bar yokhani.
and elsewhere:
Rabbi Yishmael ben Satriel also testified before Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi: Once an egg of the bird called bar yokhani fell, and the contents of the egg drowned sixty cities and broke three hundred cedar trees.
Among Jews, as among most nations (Gubernatis, "Zoological Mythology," on Birds), birds were thought to possess supernatural knowledge, because they soared in the air.
Overall, bird imagery in Semitic literature outside the Old Testament has an imaginative and mystical flare. There’s the giant ziz, the avian equivalent of leviathan and the legends that King Solomon, the wise monarch and son of King David, could understand the language of birds. We have descriptions in The Apocalypse of Abraham, a first- or second-century CE text of pre-Rabbinic Judaism, of the great patriarch and an angel making their way to heaven by aid of a pigeon’s and turtledove’s wings .
And in other writings, we learn that sparrows sing as spirits continue to be born, set forth from the Guf, a mysterious storehouse of souls. However, once the last spirit departs from this realm, the songs of sparrows will cease and the world will soon end.