THE FISH OF MOSES—JONAH—SOLOMON’S RING
The many versions of “the fish of Moses” are but delightful
explanations of the flat fish having more meat on one side than
another, or being white or colourless on one side and darkish coloured
on the other.
In one story the Almighty, annoyed with Moses for answering some one’s
query “Who was the most knowing of men?” with a simple “I,” instead of
accrediting his wisdom to God, revealed unto him, “verily, I have a
servant at a place where the two seas meet, and he is more knowing than
thou.” The legend, with the direction to Moses to take a fish and put
it in a measure, and the fish’s escape by God’s aid, etc., is too well
known for recital.
But the conclusion of Hamid of Andalusia as to the nature of the
fish is not, and may be added. “The fish of Moses which I saw in the
Mediterranean is of the breed of that _fried_ fish, a half of which
Moses and Joshua ate, and the other half God revived. It is about a
span long. On one side it has bristles and its belly is covered with
a thin skin. It has but one eye and half a head. Looking at it on one
side you would deem it dead, but the other side is perfect in all its
parts.”[1080]
To account for the difference in colour the legend of the Arabs[1081]
runs thuswise:—“Moses was once cooking a fish, and when it had been
broiled till it was brown on one side, the fire or oil gave out, and
Moses angrily threw the fish into the sea, when, although it had been
half broiled, it came to life again, and its descendants have ever
since preserved the same peculiarities of colour.”
The half-destroyed fish which recovers life meets us also in the belief
which unto this day lingers in some towns on the Black Sea, but on the
_Rhombus_, not on the Sole, is the miracle wrought.
According to a Russian legend, the tidings of the Resurrection were
brought to the Virgin Mary, when at food: incredulous and as one of
little faith she flung the uneaten half of a _Rhombus_ into the water,
bidding it, were the message true, come back to life whole! And lo!
this it instantly did.
Pictures of the Virgin, commemorating the incident are painted on a
_Rhombus_, nailed to a board, thoroughly dried, and ornamented with a
background of gold. A great ceremonial marks their removal to a shrine
hermetically sealed. The custom, no doubt, sprang from the belief that
fishing enjoyed the special protection of the Holy Mother.[1082]
[Illustration: JONAH ENTERING THE WHALE’S MOUTH.
From a 14th Century MS. in H. Schmidt, _Jona_, p. 94, fig. 16.]
Mahometan tradition abounds with fish lore of the oddest kind. The
commentators of the Koran vie, indeed, with the Talmudists in the
curious subjects to which they often devote serious study, and in their
grotesqueness of invention. The learned Rabbi el Bassam seems to have
spent fifteen whole years in the vain endeavour to discover the name of
the _chef_ who made the pottage for Esau!
The story of the fishes, who made a point of coming every Saturday
morning to tempt the Hebrews to the sin of catching them illustrates
Koranic invention. Thinking to avoid the sin and yet secure their
seducers, the sojourners went out, dammed the channels, and ate the
fish on the next day. But as there was, and in some parts of Scotland
still is, little difference as regards working on the Sabbath between
fishing and damming, the violation of the day—the punishment scarcely
fits the crime—involved their metamorphosis into apes![1083]
The Koran denies to the faithful on pilgrimage any hunting of game
_en route_, but allows fishing and eating of fish from the sea.[1084]
At first, eating of fish was apparently unlawful, because the name of
Allah could not always be pronounced over them before they died.
To remedy this enforced abstinence from such a wealth of healthy food
Mahomet blessed a knife and cast it into the sea, thus all fish were
blessed and had their throats cut before they were brought to shore.
“The large openings behind the gills are of course the wounds thus
miraculously made without killing the fish!”[1085]
We discover in another legend that an accidental act on the part of
Abraham—not a designed ceremony on the part of Mahomet—gave Mussulmans
their liberty of ichthyophagy. The patriarch, after sacrificing the ram
instead of Isaac, threw the knife into a stream and incidentally struck
a fish, whence fishes are the only animals eaten by Mahometans without
their throats being previously cut.
The place of fish in the Zodiac has been already noticed. Apparently
the position of the Pisces led Kepler to believe that he had
discovered the means of determining the true year of our Saviour’s
birth. From the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn and Mars in 1604,
the astronomer working backward found that Jupiter and Saturn were
in the constellation of the Pisces (a fish, be it noted, being the
astrological symbol for Judæa) in the latter half of the year of Rome
747, and were joined by Mars in 748. Their first union in the East
awoke the attention of the Magi, told them that the expected time had
come, and bade them set forth for Judæa.
Astronomy has been to archæology a most helpful hand-maiden in
establishing not only this but other dates of ancient, especially of
Assyrian, history.[1086]
If the surmise of Isaak Walton[1087] that Seth, the son of Adam, taught
his son to cast a line, and engraved the mystery of the craft on those
pillars of which Masons are supposed to know so much, or even if the
statement that,
“Deucalion did first this art invent
Of Angling, and his people taught the same,”
could have been verified, how many discussions on the question—formerly
almost as hotly combated as some religious doctrine—as to what was the
first method of fishing would have been avoided. Alas! an authoritative
answer is even yet to seek.
The nature of the “great fish” of Jonah will, I fear, no longer prove
an attractive subject for sermons. Identification of “the beast”
ranging through all the fishes of Ichthyology, from the celebrated
“first, aiblins it was a whale,” down to “nineteenthly” (whose
precise species I forget), will alas! with the development of the
higher criticism and of comparative mythology hardly draw the tensely
interested congregations of yore.
Tylor points out that at the root of the apologue of Jonah lies the
widely-spread Nature-myth of the sea-monster or dragon, of which the
fight between Tiāmat and Marduk, and of Andromeda and the sea-monster
are analogous developments.[1088]
[Illustration: JONAH LEAVING THE WHALE’S MOUTH.
From a 14th Century MS. in H. Schmidt, _Jona_, p. 94, fig. 17.
The picture shows that while the whale’s gastric juices had completely
absorbed Jonah’s clothes and curls, they prevailed not, possibly from
callosity of hide, against his body.]
Cheyne detects the link between the original myth and the story of
Jonah in Jeremiah li. 34, “he hath swallowed me up as a dragon: he hath
filled his maw with my delicates: he hath cast me out,” and again in
verse 44, “and I will bring forth out of his mouth that which he has
swallowed up.”
Allusions to mythical dragons occur elsewhere, as in Psalm lxxiv.
13, “Thou breakest the heads of the dragons (or sea-monsters) in the
water.” The curious belief in a dragon or fish that swallows the moon
spreads wide. This draws from Mr. R. C. Thompson[1089] the comment,
“when it is remembered that Jonah was swallowed by the ‘great fish’ for
three days (the period of the moon’s disappearance at the end of the
month), the coincidence is well worth considering; especially as Jonah
is the Hebrew word for dove, and it was at Harrān, the city sacred to
the Moon God, that the dove was sacrificed (Al. Nadim, 294).”
But whatever the “great fish,” and whatever the story’s derivation, the
whimsical treatment of the prophet’s imprisonment in a poem by the Rev.
Zachary Boyd, Rector of Glasgow University in the seventeenth century,
demands some quotation:—
“What house is this? here’s neither coal nor candle;
Where I no thing but guts of fishes handle;
The like of this on earth man never saw,
A living man within a monster’s mawe!”
He then goes on to contrast Noah’s freedom of movement in the ark with
his enforced immobility:
“He and his ark might goe and also come,
But I sit still in such a straitened roome,
As is most uncouth, head and feet together
Among such grease as would a thousand smother;
I find no way now for my shrinking hence,
But here to byde and die for mine offence;
Eight persons were in Noah’s hulk together,
Comfortable they were each one to other.
In all the earth like unto me is none
Farre from all living I heere byde alone,
Where I, entombed in melancholy sink,
Choakt, suffocat, with excremental stink.”[1090]
I close this, as my other chapters, with a legend which makes fish
directly or indirectly responsible for some historical happening.
It was through a fish (according to the Talmud) that Solomon regained
his kingdom. The King one day, while bathing, confided his signet ring
to one of his many concubines, Amina. Was it her eyes, I wonder, or
those of that Queen, Pharaonic or other (by whose happy influence
Solomon, eschewing evil and cleaving only unto her, was perhaps
inspired to write The Song of Songs), which he likens to _the pools of
Hesbon_?
A devil named Sakhar, the Talmud goes on, coming in the shape of
Solomon, obtained the ring from Amina, and by virtue of its possession
sat on the throne in Solomon’s guise. After forty days the devil flew
away, and threw the ring into the sea. The signet was immediately
swallowed by a fish, which on being caught was given to Solomon. The
ring was found in its stomach, and he, who without its credentials had
been compelled to beg for bread and from his appearance being changed
by the devil had been regarded as a preposterous pretender, “by this
means recovered his kingdom, and taking Sakhar and tying a great stone
to his neck, threw him into the sea of Tiberias.”[1091]
In another version[1092]—very probable because more characteristic of
Solomon, in that he annexes another wife—the King after the loss of his
throne became a cook in the palace of a foreign sovereign, married his
master’s daughter, bought a fish with the ring inside, and so recovered
his realm.
In another legend fish play, if not a historical, yet no small part in
connection with a famous historical character.
St. Brandan in his travels encountered Judas Iscariot, whose allotted
punishments at any rate lacked not monotony, for after each spell of
pitch and sulphur he was condemned to sit on a desolate rock in the
frozen regions. To the query as to the purpose of a cloth bandage
worn round the head, Judas made answer that it was an effectual charm
against the ferocious fishes among which he was often doomed to be
thrown, for at its sight they lost their will to bite. He had obtained
this shield because on earth he had once given a piece of cloth to a
naked beggar, and so, even unto him, a deed of charity was not allowed
by the Almighty to pass without reward.[1093]
When, in Matthew Arnold’s poem, “St. Brandan sails the northern main”
and comes across Judas on an iceberg, the fishes occur not, but the
cloth appears:
“And in the street a leper sate
Shivering with fever, naked, old;
Sand raked his sores from heel to pate,
The hot wind fevered him five-fold.
He gazed upon me as I passed
And murmur’d: Help me or I die!—
To the poor wretch my cloak I cast,
Saw him look eased, and hurried by.”
For which act of charity Judas was permitted by the angel every
Christmas night to
“Go hence and cool thyself an hour.”
FOOTNOTES:
[1080] Robinson, _op. cit._, p. 40. In S. Bochart’s _Hierozoicon_
(Leipzig, 1796), p. 869, Abuhamed Hispanus gives quite a different
account.
[1081] In Klunzinger’s _Upper Egypt_, London, 1878.
[1082] See Keller, _op. cit._, p. 369.
[1083] Cf. with these inciters to Sabbath-breaking, (A) The fish,
“called the _Jewish Sheikh_, which with a long white beard and a body
as large as a calf, but in shape like a frog and hairy as a cow, comes
out of the sea every Saturday and remains on land until sundown on
Sunday” (Robinson, _op. cit._, p. 35), and (B) the story of how on
a Friday during St. Corbinian’s pilgrimage to Rome, when although
meat and all else abounded—the Saint had always been a bit of a _bon
viveur_!—there was an absolute dearth of fish, an eagle suddenly
dropped from the clouds and let fall at the feet of the chef a fine
fish. Baring-Gould, _Lives of the Saints_, vol. X. 123 (London, 1897).
[1084] “O True Believers, kill no game while ye are on pilgrimage. It
is lawful for you to fish in the sea and eat what ye shall catch as a
provision for you and for those that travel.” The Koran (Sale, chap.
V. or “on Contracts”). “This passage,” says Jallaleddin, “is to be
understood only of fish which live altogether in the sea, and not of
those which live partly in the sea and partly on land, such as crabs.”
The Turks, who are Hanifites, never eat of the latter class; but some
sects have no scruples.
[1085] Robinson, _op. cit._, p. 41. See the _Koran_ (Sale, vol. II.
89), “God hath only forbidden you that which dieth of itself, and
blood, and swine’s flesh, and that which has been slain in the name of
any besides God.”
[1086] See _antea_, p. 388, n. 1.
[1087] _The Compleat Angler_, ch. I. “Others say that he left it (the
Art of Angling) engraven on those pillars which he erected to preserve
the knowledge of Mathematicks, Musick, and the rest of those precious
Arts, which by God’s appointment or allowance, and his noble industry
were thereby preserved from perishing in Noah’s Floud.” According
to Manetho, _Syncell Chron._, 40, these tables engraved with sacred
characters were translated into the Greek tongue in hieroglyphic
characters, and committed to writing and deposited in the temples
of Egypt. See the _Epistle of Manetho, the Sebennyte_, to Ptolemæus
Philadelphus, and I. P. Cory, _Ancient Fragments of Phœnician, Egyptian
and other writings_ (London, 1832), pp. 168-9, and Eusebius, _Chron._
6. Cf. Georgius Syncellus, _Chronographia_ (Bonnæ, 1829), i. pp. 72-3.
[1088] An excellent monograph by Hans Schmidt (_Jona Eine Untersuchung
zur vergleichenden Religionsgeshichte_, Göttingen, 1907) gives 39 cuts.
[1089] _Op. cit._, p. 53.
[1090] _Four Poems from Zion’s Flowers_, etc., by Mr. Zacharie Boyd,
printed from his manuscripts in the Library of the University of
Glasgow, edited by G. Neil, Glasgow, 1855. Perhaps the Rector’s Muse
was spurred to these heights of poesie by the fact that the arms of the
City of Glasgow bear a salmon with a ring in its mouth, illustrative
of the miracle wrought by St. Kentigern, the founder of the See and
first bishop. At the Reformation the revenue of the church included
one hundred and sixty-eight salmon. See T. Moule, _Heraldry of Fish_
(London, 1842), pp. 124-5. In the recovery of the keys of cathedrals
and episcopal rings, fish play a part, as the adventures of St. Egwin
(vol. i. 161), of St. Benno (vol. vi. 224), and of St. Maurilius (vol.
x. 188), described by Baring-Gould (_op. cit._) all testify.
[1091] Sale, _Sura 38 of the Koran_, gives, as regards the incident,
references to: (A) _The Talmud_, probably to the treatise _Gittin_,
pp. 68, _a_, _b_. See _Jew. Encycl._, xi. 448, and cf. p. 443_b_. (B)
_En Jacob_, Pt. ii.—probably to a work of this title, _Well of Jacob_,
a collection of legends and parables by Jacob ben Solomon ibn Chabib
from the _Babylonian Talmud_, 2 vols. (Amsterdam, 1684-85). (C) _Yalkut
in lib. Reg._, p. 182—this is a collection of expositions of the O.T.
books and first printed in 1521. Solomon’s throwing of the demon seems
quite justifiable, if Sakhar and Asmodeus were under different names
one and the same, for from _Gittin_, 68 _b_, we learn that the demon,
after swallowing Solomon, “_spat him a distance of 400 miles_,” a
feat in ballistics, or “the art of propelling _heavy bodies_,” which
surpasses even the German long-range gun.
[1092] _Jewish Ency._, xi. 441.
[1093] R. Blakey, _op. cit._, p. 145 (_more suo_), gives as his
authority merely “one of the poetical effusions of the Anglo-Norman
Trouvéres.”
CHINESE FISHING
[Illustration: CHINESE ANGLING.
From _Tū Shu Chi Ch’êng_, XVII, Pl. 16.]
CHINESE FISHING