The dawn crow of the cockerel in the Passion Narrative: - (Part 1)
In Judaism there are ‘interpretive commentaries which surround many of the text of the Old Testament, called ‘Midrash’. One such Midrash is about King Solomon and the building of the First Temple. The Midrash talks of a tool, the ‘shamir’ which is required to cut the stone for the Temple. The shamir is in the charge of a wild cockerel, the hoopoe. “An essential element in Solomon's construction of the Temple was the miraculous shamir stonecutter. In instructing us how to make the permanent altar to God, the Torah says, "do not build it out of cut stone" (Ex. 20:22). The shamir disappeared after the destruction of the Temple.
The Nature of the Shamir:- The word "shamir" in biblical Hebrew was used in two senses: a) a penpoint made out of a hard substance (Jeremiah 17:1); or b) sharp thorns (Isaiah 5:6).
Each usage relates to the ability of the shamir to pierce hard surfaces. The Talmud and later great rabbis described how the passage of the shamir along the surface of a stone would cause it to split perfectly into two pieces.
Small as a barleycorn (less than one centimeter), the shamir did not have an inspiring physical appearance. According to Rabbi Bachiya in the Talmud, the shamir was first used at the time of the construction of the Tabernacle to engrave the names of the tribes on the precious jewels of the High Priest's breastplate. For safekeeping, the shamir was kept wrapped in wool, placed in a lead basket filled with barley bran (Talmud, Sota 48b.) The choice of these materials was specific, since no other materials were able to resist its penetrative powers.
A Midrash recounts that even King Solomon had no idea where to find the shamir, although he knew he needed it to build the Temple. Solomon went to great lengths to obtain the shamir, even to the point, evidently, of contacting demons who had some relationship with the shamir and the other supernatural phenomena. The Midrash relates that Solomon consulted the king of the demons, who did not have it but knew that the angel of the sea had given the shamir to the hoopoe bird (dukhifat, Lev. 11:19), a type of fowl who needed it to survive. In the end, King Solomon captured the shamir from the hoopoe, a ‘wild cockerel’. (See:- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoopoe )
The shamir was used by man only in the construction of the Tabernacle and the Temple. Supernatural beings created by God for specific functions do not exist forever. The Mishna (Sota 9:12) states that the shamir existed until the destruction of the Second Temple. According to the Tosefta, the shamir disappeared after the destruction of the Temple (my note: in the year 70 A.D, some 27 years after the events of the first Easter, that is, the Death and Resurrection of Jesus) since it was no longer needed.” (Taken from:- https://www.chabad.org/kabbalah/article_cdo/aid/38030 3/jewish/Modern-Physics-and-the-Shamir.htm )
“Hoopoes will also feed on insects on the surface, probe into piles of leaves, and even use the bill to lever large stones and flake off bark.” We can understand the origins of the idea of the ‘rock splitter’ in the Midrash from the observations made about this wild cockerel, the hoopoe.