418 FORBIDDEN FISH—NETTING—VIVARIA 
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 ? ”’ 
(B) The line and hook. The line occurs only in Job xli. 1, 
“Canst thou draw out Leviathan (i.e. the crocodile) with a 
fish hook (hakkah), or press down his tongue with a cord 
(hebel) ?”’ (R.V.). The hook, designated by several names, finds 
frequent place in descriptions and metaphors in the O.T. 
The difficult verse (Job xli. 2), ““Canst thou put a rope 
(agmén, literally, as in R.V. margin, a rope of rushes) into his 
(Leviathan’s) nose? ”’ is possibly explained by the ordinary 
procedure of fishermen in carrying their fish! The (marginal) 
“rope of rushes ”’ will recall to many a boy and many a man 
how often a handy rush has served for carrying home his 
catch of small fish. For the crocodile, however, such means 
of portage, as it is the intent of the verse to make clear, would 
in Bret Harte’s parlance be “ onsatisfactory.”’ 
The word, it has been held, probably means a ring, placed 
in the mouth of a fish by a rope of reeds tied to a stake, for 
the purpose of keeping it alive in the water. The use of a ring 
would give a perfect parallelism, ‘‘a ring in his nose” and 
“a hook in his jaw.” Benzinger, however, makes it very 
doubtful whether this practice of keeping fish alive by a ring 
ever prevailed among the Jews. 
The lure, or esca, was ground bait. Travellers. maintain 
that even now no Nile or Palestine fish is educated enough 
to rise to a fly. But my friend Dr. Henry Van Dyke, author 
of Little Rivers and other fascinating books, shows me from a 
diary kept during his visit to Palestine in 1907 that this rule 
certainly has exceptions. 
Wading from shore near the mouth of a stream flowing into 
Lake Tiberias, and again near the head waters of the Jordan 
above the Lake of Merom, he found pleasant clear streams 
where fish took the fly willingly. Whether this departure 
from traditional habit was due to the skill of the super-man, 
2 Wilkinson, op. cit., II. p. 118. 
