A friend, in the hope of helping me to some authoritative information as regards Angling, suggested Jagd, Fischfang, und Bienenzucht bei den Juden in der tannäischen Zeit, by Herr Moritz Mainzer, as the very last word on Jewish fishing. Unable (owing to the War) to obtain this in book form, I tracked it eventually to some articles under the same title in the magazine, Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums (1909). Except for a pearl or two such as “Fishermen, then as now in Palestine, worked lightly dressed or naked,”—was this suggested by St. John, or P. Fletcher’s, “Now when Simon heard, he girt his fisher’s coat unto him, for he was naked”?—Fischfang (at any rate) far from rewards one’s search.
Mainzer’s two sentences (p. 463) assist not at all in determining whether or not the Jews used the Rod. “Die eigentliche ḥakkāh war ein eiserner an eine Leine (ḥebhel) befestigter Haken. Die Leine selbst konnte mit einer Rute oder einem Stabe verbunden sein der zuweilen mehrere Schnüre mit Angeln trug” (the ḥakkāh proper was an iron hook fastened to a fishing ḥebhel. This line might be attached to a rod or stick, which sometimes had on it several cords with fishing hooks).
The supporting references come from no Israelitish source, but from Assyrian representations of hand-lining in Layard’s Nineveh, and from Egyptian delineations of Rod fishing in Wilkinson’s Ancient Egyptians. Not a single word does Mainzer quote from any authority on Jewish Angling. The words, “to a Rod which sometimes had on it several cords with fishing hooks,” simply translate Wilkinson’s Plate 371.
Had I weighed the title and duly appreciated the combination of Hunting, Fishing, and Bee-culture! I would have been perhaps prepared for a disappointment, but the output of, or the “cultural associations” in, a German work often defy prediction from its mere headings. Mainzer, in his Fischfang, serves to recall Porson’s lines, which are themselves but an adaptation of a Greek epigram,[1014]
“The Germans in Greek Are sadly to seek, Not five in five score But ninety-five more. All save only Hermann, And Hermann’s a German!”
Lest my own conclusion—that neither in the Old or New Testament is the implied use of the Rod established—carry little weight, I subjoin the conclusions (stated in letters to me) arrived at by two well-known Hebrew scholars.
The first comes from Professor A. R. S. Kennedy (the writer of the article on Fishing in the Encyclopædia Biblica): “In short you are entirely justified, so far as evidence goes, in saying that the Jews did not use the Rod.”
The second comes from Dr. St. Clair Tisdall: “We find in the Bible no proof of fishing with Rod and line: on the contrary the fact that no mention whatever, direct or indirect, of the fishing Rod occurs either in the Bible or (as far as my reading goes) in the Talmud, makes it almost certain that the Rod was not used by the Jews. At any rate the use of any such instrument is not implied in either Book.”
A second reason for the absence of the Rod may be that of dates. The Jews, it might be urged, were not and could not be aware of Egyptian Angling, because it sprang up subsequent to their Exodus from the country. The reply I offer involves, it is true, that bewildering factor, Egyptian chronology. But even if a thousand years are as nothing in the sight of Manetho and many others, surely one epoch correlates with another, and the shifting of one date automatically involves the shifting of others.
The date of the Exodus, like most Egyptian dates, hitherto a matter of considerable contention, is now generally agreed as falling between 1300 and 1200 b.c. Petrie[1015] fixes on “1220 b.c. or possibly rather later,” Hanbury Brown places the Flight ten years earlier, i.e. 1230, for reasons based mainly on the stele of King Menephtah.[1016]