So if the contention that the Israelites could not well know of the Rod because of its invention after their flight holds water, any representation of Rod fishing must obviously be subsequent to the year 1230 or 1220 b.c. Only two such representations exist: (A) (in Wilkinson’s Plate 370) comes from the tomb (No. 93) of Kenamūm at Thebes, and dates from about the second half of the XVIIIth Dynasty, or some 200 years before the Exodus, while (B) (in Wilkinson’s Plate 371, and in Newberry’s Beni Hasan, vol. I. Plate XXIX.) goes back to the early XIIth Dynasty or some 750 years before the Exodus.[1017]
The Exodus, whatever date be assigned, probably occurred in the time of and was occasioned by a dynasty non-Semitic, and unfavourable to Israel. The corvée enforced doubtless by the kourbash was exacted from the aliens, whose task (Exodus i. 11) included the building of two brick fortresses to block the eastern road into Egypt.
To most of us unacquainted with the making of bricks the cruelty of the Pharaonic command, “There shall be no straw given you, yet shall ye deliver the tale of bricks,” seems to consist in demanding from the sojourners the same quantity of output without their possessing, as the Egyptian workers did possess, an essential constituent in the brick-straw.
But Petrie points out that straw, so far from being an essential of the mixture, is absent from most ancient and modern bricks. The complaint arose because finely chopped straw is very useful for preventing the mud from sticking to the hand, for dusting over the ground, and for coating each lump before dropping it in the mould, thus enabling the work to go on quickly and easily. From the strawless Jew, however, was extorted for the same hours a tale of bricks equal to that of the Egyptian enjoying these advantages.
In direct opposition to Petrie, Maspero states, and Erman[1018] agrees, that the ordinary Egyptian brick, both ancient and modern, is “a mere block of mud, mixed with chopped straw and a little sand.”
Other reasons for the Jewish unfamiliarity with the Rod, viz. its merely local use, and their settlement in the North East of Egypt remote from “the River of Egypt,” would fully be met, were it not for Isaiah, with the simple statement that at present they can neither be proved nor disproved.
But the words of Isaiah xix. 8, “The fishers also shall lament, and all they that cast angle into the Nile shall mourn,” surely demonstrate—if we allow that “cast angle” is the proper technical translation, and that the two words cannot mean the mere throwing of a hook with a hand-line—that the Israelites during the 430 years (Exodus xii. 40) of their sojourn in Egypt did acquire familiarity with the methods of fishing employed by their taskmasters.
Still, even if we take it as proved that for some reason Angling was at the time of the Exodus an unknown art to the Jews, why with all the intercourse of the subsequent centuries was the knowledge of the existence and value of the Rod not acquired?[1019]
Those and other queries may have found a ready reply in the reputed but lost Book of Solomon on Fishes.[1020] It may possibly have contained some clue, such as a command or custom, totemistic or other, common to the old Semitic stock, or some trait of temperament which caused Angling to be regarded as too slow or too unremunerative a pastime.
Without its guidance one is almost driven to the conclusion that the ancient Israelites (like the early Greeks and Romans) were pot-hunters, bent on the spoil rather than on the sport of their catch, but (unlike them) continued this characteristic throughout their history, and remained to the end uninfected by the joy or passion of Angling. Their desire was fish—abundant and cheap, or better still gratis: hence when “fed up” with Manna (Numbers xi. 5) they fell a-lusting—“Who shall give us flesh to eat? We remember the fish we did eat in Egypt for nought.”