Fishing from the earliest times - Blog

4i6FORBIDDEN FISH—NETTING—F/F^i^/^The Jews acquired no intimate knowledge of the ichthyicbranch of natural history. Although acquainted with someof the names given by the Egyptians and Alexandrians todifferent species (Josephus compares a fish found in the sea ofGennesaret to the Coracinus i) they adopted no similar methodof distinguishing them, or any classification beyond the broaddivision of clean and unclean. The biological knowledgeconcerning fish shown in the Talmud was of a very primitiveorder, not merely in regard to embryology and propagation, butalso as to hatching. 2It does, indeed, require the firmly-shut eye of faith toconceive that the fish of Raphael's great Madonna del Pesce,which scarcely weighs two pounds and is carried on a stringby the youth Tobias, can have been to him an object of dangerand terror, or that it" leaped out of the river and would haveswallowed him " had itnot been for the Angel's command toseize the brute (Tobit vi. 2, 3). Raphael's cartoon is anotherinstance of the untrammelled liberty of the Italian artist.Most of the fishes are mere nondescript piscine forms of artisticfancy, but two are certainly of the Skate or Ray family, whichis never found in fresh water !Then, again, how oddly Botticelh and other paintersmisconceive their man-eating fish, which must have been acrocodile strayed from the Indus or the Nile to the waters ofthe Tigris.Fortunately Dr. Tristram 3 comes to our aid as regards thefresh-water fish of modern, and probably of ancient Palestine.Of his forty-three species,westerly Mediterranean rivers and lakes.only eight are common to the moreOf thirty-six foundin the Jordan and its afiluents, but one occurs in the ordinarythree to accompany him, that these three were all Fishermen." As a contrastto the excellent character given to the four fisher Apostles by Walton, alearned divine of Worms, J. Ruchard, found it incumbent in 1479 to defendPeter from the charge of instituting abstinence from flesh, so that he couldprofitably dispose of his fish ! Keller, op. cit., p. 335.^ B. J., III. 10, 18. " It is watered by a most fertile fountain. Somehave thought it to be a vein of the Nile, as it produces the Coracin fish aswell as that lake does, which is near Alexandria."'^Smith's Hist, of the Bible (1890), and Singer's Jewish Encyclopadia,v., p. 403, however, mention the Tunny, Herring, Eel, etc.* See, also, E. W. G. Masterman, Studies in Galilee, Chicago, 1909.