Fishing from the earliest times - Blog

withPRIESTS CLAD AS FISH—SARGON—MOSES 387fishlike robe to signify that they derived their divinations andincantations from the sacred water, of which Ea was the god.In the lower register are drawings of cult utensils,such asholy water bowls, censers, etc., and of the fever demon Labartu,who has been driven from the body of the man and is in flightby boat. The reverse of this bronze has in deep relief one of theseven devils who is in the act of peering over the upper edge ofthe bronze, and gazing upon the scene of atonement and magicalhealing below.The cuneiform texts prescribe that fumigation, either forcleansing a person or exorcising a demon, may be performed bythe wizard, with or without a censer, a bowl, or lighted torch. ^Apart from its permeation of Israel in legislation as indicatedin connection with Hammurabi's Code, the influence of Assyriastands out in other ways clearly. The semi-similarity oftreatment of the Deluge has already been noticed, while therendering in the stories of Sargon and Moses of a widespreadlegend 2 differs only in such points of detail as the substitutionof the Nile or (according to Arabic tradition) of a fish-pond forthe Euphrates, and of the irrigator Akki as the discoverer of thechest of reeds for Pharaoh's daughter. ^^ Compare the exorcism by Tobias of Sara's demon in Tobit. Langdon,Babylonian Magic and Sorcery {op. cit.), p. 223, commenting on the difficult}',which Semitic philology does not clear up, as to whether a wizard is one whocuts himself (as Robertson Smith and most scholars suppose), or whether he isone who casts his spell by whispering or ventriloquy, holds that " from theSumerian word and the Sumerian ideogram of the word uhdugga which meansone who whispers as he casts saliva, we can settle at once the most primitivemethod of sorcery known to us."2 Cf . those of Moses and Sargon the stories of Gilgamesh King of Babylon(jEhan, XII. 22), of Semiramis Queen of Assyria (Diodorus Siculus, ii. 4), andof Kama in the Indian Epic of Mahabharata (Cheyne's Traditions and Beliefsof Ancient Israel (London, 1907), p. 519." It has been conjectured," writesFrazer {op. cit.), II. p. 454 " If, that in stories like that of the exposure of Mosesin the water (in this case, unlike most others, all supernatural elements areabsent) we have a reminiscence of the old custom as practised by the Celtae onthe Rhine, and according to Speke by some Central African tribes in the lastcentury, of testing the legitimacy of children by throwing them into the waterto sink or swim ; the infants which sank were rejected as bastards. In thelight of this conjecture it may be significant that in several of these storiesthe birth of the child is represented as supernatural, which in this connectioncynics are apt to regard as a delicate synonym for illegitimate." On p. 454he touches on the question whether Moses, the son of Amram by his (Amram's)paternal aunt, was thus the offspring of an incestuous marriage, and thereforeexposed on the Nile.' See Rogers, Cuneiform Parallels to the Old Testament (London, 1912), pp.135 ff.