CHAPTER XLII

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]

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]

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

CHINESE FISHING