4i6 FORBIDDEN FISH— NETTING— F/F^/?7.4 



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 i) 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. 2 



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 hberty 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 BotticelH 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 3 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 



three to accompany him, that these three were all Fishermen." As a contrast 

 to the excellent character given to the four fisher Apostles by Walton, a 

 learned divine of Worms, J. Ruchard, found it incumbent in 1479 to defend 

 Peter from the charge of instituting abstinence from flesh, so that he could 

 profitably dispose of his fish ! Keller, op. cii., p. 335. 



1 B. J., III. 10, 18. " It is watered by a most fertile fountain. Some 

 have thought it to be a vein of the Nile, as it produces the Coracin fish as 

 well as that lake does, which is near Alexandria." 



2 Smith's Hist, of the Bible (1890), and Singer's Jewish Encyclopadia, 

 v., p. 403, however, mention the "Tunny, Herring, Eel, etc. 



* See, also, E. W. G. Masterman, Studies in Galilee, Chicago, 1909. 



