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,
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]
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:—
He then goes on to contrast Noah’s freedom of movement in the ark with his enforced immobility:
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:
For which act of charity Judas was permitted by the angel every Christmas night to