It is a strange fact that these many references to fishing neither in the Old, where they are mostly metaphorical, nor in the New Testament, where they are chiefly historical, give the specific name of a single fish family. Dag and nun are the generic terms covering all species. The large sea fish are collectively termed “tannim.”[1029] The fish of Tobit, of Jonah, of the Psalms, are only spoken of generically. None of the Apostles, of whom four, Peter, Andrew, James, and John, were professional fishermen, has troubled himself to identify by name even the actual fish of the miraculous draught.[1030]
The Jews acquired no intimate knowledge of the ichthyic branch of natural history. Although acquainted with some of the names given by the Egyptians and Alexandrians to different species (Josephus compares a fish found in the sea of Gennesaret to the Coracinus[1031]) they adopted no similar method of distinguishing them, or any classification beyond the broad division of clean and unclean. The biological knowledge concerning fish shown in the Talmud was of a very primitive order, not merely in regard to embryology and propagation, but also as to hatching.[1032]
It does, indeed, require the firmly-shut eye of faith to conceive that the fish of Raphael’s great Madonna del Pesce, which scarcely weighs two pounds and is carried on a string by the youth Tobias, can have been to him an object of danger and terror, or that it “leaped out of the river and would have swallowed him” had it not been for the Angel’s command to seize the brute (Tobit vi. 2, 3). Raphael’s cartoon is another instance of the untrammelled liberty of the Italian artist. Most of the fishes are mere nondescript piscine forms of artistic fancy, but two are certainly of the Skate or Ray family, which is never found in fresh water!
Then, again, how oddly Botticelli and other painters misconceive their man-eating fish, which must have been a crocodile strayed from the Indus or the Nile to the waters of the Tigris.
Fortunately Dr. Tristram[1033] comes to our aid as regards the fresh-water fish of modern, and probably of ancient Palestine. Of his forty-three species, only eight are common to the more westerly Mediterranean rivers and lakes. Of thirty-six found in the Jordan and its affluents, but one occurs in the ordinary Mediterranean fresh-water fauna, two in the Nile, seven in the Tigris, Euphrates, and adjacent rivers, ten in other parts of Syria, while sixteen are quite peculiar to the basin of the Jordan. The fish fauna is very isolated, but shows affinities to that of the Ethiopian zoo-geographical region, and probably dates from a geological time when the Jordan and the rivers of North-East Africa belonged to the same system.[1034]
Of these fish, two demand notice.
(1) Chromis simonis. In the rare instances where fish take any care of their eggs or young, the task nearly always devolves on the male; here, the husband performs it by taking the ova into his mouth, till their development in the large cheek-pouches causes such swelling that he is unable to use his mouth. This uncomfortable condition exists and increases until as fry about four inches long they quit the paternal abode.[1035]
(2) Clarias macracanthus, found in the Nile, as well as in the Lake of Gennesaret. In their spawning migration they have often to travel stretches of dwindling streams with water insufficient to cover them, or absent altogether.[1036] By means of an accessory bronchial organ they can live at least two whole days out of water. When they thus behold all the wonders of terrestrial existence, including its choicest perfection, Man, is it surprising that they “utter a squeaking or hissing sound,” or teste Masterman, “cat-like squeak”?
The methods of fishing in Palestine, like those (save Angling) of Egypt and the ancient world, were:—
(A) The spear, harpoon, and bident (still used in Lebanon and Syria) of which we read in Job xli. 7, “Canst thou fill his skin with barbed irons, or his head with fish spears?”