Leviticus 11:13 - Joseph Benson’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

All such fowls and birds as are rapacious, and live upon prey, as the eagle, and its several kinds, hawks, kites, vultures, ravens, &c., are forbidden, and probably on a moral as well as a natural account, their flesh not only being not so good in itself as that of others, but not so fit to be used by a people that was consecrated to God, and professed greater innocency, justice, and purity, than the rest of the world. For, being all either ravenous and cruel, or such as delight in the night and darkness, or such as feed upon impure things, it seems evident that the prohibition of them was intended to teach men to abominate all cruelty and oppression, and all works of darkness and filthiness. The eagle Whose flesh is hard, and whose nature is very rapacious. The ossifrage From the Latin, ossifragus, a kind of eagle, so called from breaking the bones of its prey, which it does by carrying them up on high, and then letting them fall upon a rock. The ospray Another kind of eagle, probably the paliætus, or sea eagle, as it is here rendered by the Seventy. Bochart, however, thinks it rather means the melanætus, or black eagle, which Homer mentions (Iliad, 21: 252,) as the strongest and swiftest of birds.