Cormorant

The cormorant appears in the UPDV at two specific points: in the Levitical and Deuteronomic lists of birds forbidden as food, set among other water-haunting and carrion-eating species. Beyond those two lists the bird does not recur by name; the same Hebrew slot in later prophetic desolation scenes is rendered "pelican" in UPDV, where the wilderness imagery picks up the broader company of unclean birds that surround the cormorant in the food-law texts.

In The Pentateuchal Lists Of Forbidden Birds

In the Levitical catalog of birds that may not be eaten, the cormorant stands in the middle of a sequence of owls: "and the little owl, and the cormorant, and the great owl" (Lev 11:17), with the next line continuing "and the horned owl, and the pelican, and the vulture" (Lev 11:18). The Deuteronomic restatement of the same food law gives the same cluster in a slightly different order, closing with the cormorant: "the little owl, and the great owl, and the horned owl" (Deut 14:16), "and the pelican, and the vulture, and the cormorant" (Deut 14:17). In both passages the cormorant is grouped with owls, the pelican, and the vulture — birds whose habits associate them with carrion, with watery margins, or with night.

Wilderness And Desolation Imagery

The prophetic scenes of judgment that traditionally include the cormorant turn, in UPDV, on the company of birds it keeps in the food laws rather than on the cormorant itself. Edom under judgment becomes a haunt of those same Levitical creatures: "But the pelican and the porcupine will possess it; and the owl and the raven will stay in it: and he will stretch over it the line of confusion, and the plummet of emptiness" (Isa 34:11). Nineveh's collapse pictures the city's ruined columns as a roosting-place for the same kind of bird: "both the pelican and the porcupine will lodge in her capitals; [their] voice will sing in the windows; desolation will be in the thresholds: for he has laid bare the cedar-work" (Zeph 2:14). The pelican, owl, raven, and porcupine that fill these scenes are members of the same unclean cohort the cormorant belongs to in Lev 11:17 and Deut 14:17, so the desolation imagery sits alongside the food-law material even where the cormorant is not named in the prophetic verse itself.