Fishing from the earliest times - Blog

;442 FISH OF MOSES—JONAH—SOLOMON'S RINGthe development of the higher criticism and of comparativemythology hardly draw the tensely interested congregationsof yore.Tylor points out that at the root of the apologue of Jonahlies the widely-spread Nature-myth of the sea-monster ordragon, of which the fight betweenTiamat and Marduk, and ofAndromeda and the sea-monsterare analogous developments, iCheyne detects the link betweenthe original myth and the storyof Jonah in Jeremiah li. 34, " hehath swallowed me up as a dragon :he hath filled his maw with mydelicates : he hath cast me out,"and again in verse 44, " and Iwill bring forth out of his mouththat which he has swallowed up."Allusions to mythical dragonsoccur elsewhere, as in Psalm Ixxiv.13, " Thou breakest the heads ofthe dragons (or sea-monsters) inthe water." The curious belief ina dragon or fish that swallows themoon spreads wide. This drawsfrom Mr. R. C. Thompson 2 thecomment, " when it is rememberedJONAH LEAVING THE WHALE'SMOUTH,From a 14th Century MS. inH. Schmidt, Jona, p. 94, fig. 17.The picture shows that while that Jonah was swallowed by thethe whale's gastric juices hadcompletely absorbed Jonah's'great fish ' for three days (theclothes and curls, they prevailednot, possibly from callosity ofhide, against his body.period of the moon's disappearanceat the end of the month), the coincidenceis well worth consideringespecially as Jonah is the Hebrew word for dove, and it wasat Harran, the city sacred to the Moon God, that the dovewas sacrificed (Al. Nadim, 294)."But whatever the " great fish," and whatever the story's^ An excellent monograph by Hans Schmidt (Jona Eine UntersuchungZiir vergleichenden Religionsgeshichte, Gottingen, 1907) gives 39 cuts,« Op. cit.. p. 53.