JONAH ENTERING
THE WHALE’S MOUTH.
From a 14th Century MS.
in H. Schmidt, Jona,
p. 94, fig. 16.
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.