Ossifrage

Heb. peres = to "break" or "crush", the lammer-geier, or bearded vulture, the largest of the whole vulture tribe. It was an unclean bird (Lev. 11:13; Deut. 14:12). It is not a gregarious bird, and is found but rarely in Palestine. "When the other vultures have picked the flesh off any animal, he comes in at the end of the feast, and swallows the bones, or breaks them, and swallows the pieces if he cannot otherwise extract the marrow. The bones he cracks [hence the appropriateness of the name ossifrage, i.e., "bone-breaker"] by letting them fall on a rock from a great height. He does not, however, confine himself to these delicacies, but whenever he has an opportunity will devour lambs, kids, or hares. These he generally obtains by pushing them over cliffs, when he has watched his opportunity; and he has been known to attack men while climbing rocks, and dash them against the bottom. But tortoises and serpents are his ordinary food...No doubt it was a lammer-geier that mistook the bald head of the poet AEschylus for a stone, and dropped on it the tortoise which killed him" (Tristram's Nat. Hist.).

פרס, Lev. xi, 13; Deut. xiv, 12. Interpreters are not agreed on this bird; some read vulture,” others the black eagle,” others the falcon.” The name _peres_, by which it is called in Hebrew, denotes to crush, to break;” and this name agrees with our version, which implies the bone-breaker,” which name is given to a kind of eagle, from the circumstance of its habit of breaking the bones of its prey, after it has eaten the flesh: some say also, that he even swallows the bones thus broken. Onkelos uses a word which signifies naked,” and leads us to the vulture: indeed, if we were to take the classes of birds in any thing like a natural order in the passages here referred to, the vulture should follow the eagle as an unclean bird. The Septuagint interpreter also renders vulture; and so do Munster, Schindler, and the Zurick versions.