fish (1 Sam. v, 4). On this account the worship of fish is expressly prohibited (Deut. iv, 18). See Da- gon. The form of a fish (Xotius Poseidon) was, from remote ages, a type of protective dominion, which the symbolizing spirit of the ancients caused to pass into Christianity, as appears from Eusebius {Life of Con- stantine') and St. Augustine QDe Civitate Dei). On the walls of the oldest catacombs of Kome the representa- tion of the IX9TS is frequently discernible, and al- ways interpreted as an emblem of the Saviour.
Taking fishes in the scientific sense of "oviparous, vertebrated, cold-blooded animals, breathing water by means of gills or branchue, and generally provided with fins," none arc mentioned by name throughout tlie 0. T. and N. T. ; but, regarded in the popular and inexact sense of aquatic animals, inhabitants more or less of the water, we meet with eleven instances which require some notice here. 1. That well-known batra- chian reptile, the frog (?'!1"'3:2, tseparde d), which emerges from a fish-like infancy, breathing by gills instead of lungs, and respiring water instead of air, is often mentioned in Exod. viii, but only in two passages else, Psa. Ixxviii, 45, and cv, 30. See Frog. 2. The annelid horse-leech, whose name occurs onlj^ once, Prov. XXX, 15 (pip'^':!, alukak'). " It would appear that the blood-sucking quality of this useful little ani- mal is a direct and exclusive ordination of Providence for man's advantage. That blood is not the natural food of the animal is probable from the fact that, in the streams and pools which they inhabit, not one in a hundred could, in the common course of things, ever indulge such an appetite ; and even when received into the stomach, it does not appear to be digested ; for, though it will remain there for weeks without co- agulating or becoming putrid, yet the animal usuallj' dies unless the blood be vomited through the mouth" (Gosse's Zoobgy, ii, 374). Of course it is the smaller species, ths Hirudo medicinalis, that is here referred to. But the larger species, the Hcemopsis sunguisuga, or ^^ hurse-leech," has a still greater voracit}' for blood. Bochart {flleroz. ii, 790-802) and Schultens (Prov. in loc.) give another turn to Prov. xxx, 15, by identifying ilp'by with the Arabic alii!:, and makingya^e or des- tin}-, instead of the horse-leech, the insatiable exacter. The ancient versions, however, must be deemed to out- weigh their learned speculations ; added to which the Arabic alahaf, the S3'r!ac cduka, and the Chaldee and Talmudic Uphv or Xp^lb:^", all designate the leech, which is as abundant in the East as it ever was in our Western countries. The blood-appetite of this animal made it suitable to point a proverb : Horace saj's, Non missura cittern, nisi plena cruorls, hirudo (De Arte Poet. 476). With this comp. Plautus, Epidicus, ii, 2, 4, 5; and Cicero, ad Atticum, lil). i, epist. 13. See Horse- leech. 3. The testaceous mollusk (Ostrea marina, Gesenius, Thes. p. 1263), called l)y the Hebrews " "^f^X, argavvni ; by Avicenna, Alargiawan ; by Galen, 9a- Xauaia (f>nn(p{ipa, is the 3furex trunctdus of zoology, from which the renowned Tj'rian dye used to be ob- tained. This shell-fish (and not the '^jmrple" extract- ed from it) is with good reason supposed by Gesenius to be referred to in Cant, vii, 5 : The tresses of thine head are like the wreathed shell of the purple-fish ; re- minding us of the ancient head-dresses of the Atheni- ans, described by Thucydides, i, 6, 3 (comp. tlie coni- cal head-tuft of the Ro"man Tutu/us [Varro, De ling, latin, vii, 3, 90], and Virgil's Crines noditntur in aurum). A second reference to this shell-fish probablj' occurs in Ezek. xxvii, 7. The Tyrians seem to have imported some mutices from the Peloponnesus (the same as '^ El'shdh" according to Hecren, Researches, Asiatic Nations [Oxford, trans.], i, 361^) ; and Gesenius sup- poses that these, the material out of which the cele- brated d3'e was procured, are referred to l)y the prophet in his enumeration of the Tj'rian merchandise. That
FISH
576
FISH
these fishes were supplied from the coast of Greece we learn from Horace, Od. ii, 18, 7 {Laconlcm pu)-pune) ; fioni Pausanias, iii, 21, G ; and from Pliny, ix, 30. See PuKPi.E. 4. The other word used hy Ezekiel in this passage, r^aP, teke'kth, is described by Gesenius, Thes. p. 1503, as "'a species of shell-fish {CoiichjUum, He- lix iantfdiice [concha;]), found cleaving to the rocks in the Mediterranean Sea, covered with a violet shell (Forskal, Descript. animal, p. 127), from which was pro- cured a dark-blue dye." In the many other passages where these two words occur, thej-^ undoubtedly desig- nate either the colors or the material dyed in them. The pln-ase " treasures hid in the sand'' (Dent, xxxii, 19) is supixised to refer to the abundance of the rich dyes afforded b}' the rbzn and other testaceous ani- mals found in the sand, on the Phoenician coast, as- signed to Zebulon and Issachar (Targum of Jonathan b. Uziel, Walton, iv, 387, and Gesenius, Thes. p. 1503). See Blue. 5. The ytT\, tannin {plur. C'^i'^Sn or C;5"'3!rO must be carefully distinguished from n"":?!, tanniin , the j'^ural of the unused word )7\, a jackal, according to Gesenius, Thesaur. p. 1138. '• The sea- monsters," wliich are described Ijy Jeremiah (Lament, iv, 3) as " suckling their j'oung," used to bo regarded as the mammiferous whales or other large cetacea (Calmet Ijj' Taylor, " Fragments" on Natural Historij, No. xxvi). They are by Gesenius (/. c.) supposed to be rather ^''ITi, jackals ; this is the reading of some of the MSS. (Kennicott, ii, 546), and Gesenius accepts the Masoretic text as an Aramaic form of it. In Ezek. xxix, 3, and xxxii, 2, the textual reading B"'i?l, ■which is represented usuallj' as an anomalous singular noun, should no doubt be 'piO, the regular singular, which may well bear (what the other word could not) the suitable sense of crocodile; the MS. authority in favor of tlie latter word is overwhelming (Kennicott, ii, 212). For a description of tlic ""'ir, sec Whale. G. Til-rta, Behemoth' (q. v.). 7. "i^^^!!^. Leviathan. See Crocodile. 8. '• The great fish," ?Tl-\ 31, of Jonah i, 17 (Sl^'H in ii, 1), was probably some species of shark, such as the Z7j/jxna malleus, or the Carcharias vulgaris (the white shark), therefore strictly a fish. Of the same kind of Iiuge fish, m'OpioT^ofpayot, does Amos speak in prophecy, ix, S, "I will command the serpent from the bottom of the sea, and he shall bite them" (Bochart, T/ieroz. i, c. 40, 1. 40). The difficulty that in the Sept. of Jonah, and in the Greek Testament (Matt, xii, 40), Kr/roc is the word by which the fish is designated, is removed by the fact that this Greek term does not specificallj' indicate vhales only, as the objection supposes, but any of the larger inhabitants of the deep. (Wesseling's Herodot. Frugm. de Inrre- metito Xili, p. 789, as quoted in Valpy's Stephani Thes. s. v. Ki/rof ; here ^^pisces," as well as '■'■iellnm qucellbet ingenfes, veluti crocodilus et hippopotamus," are in- cluded.) Accordingly KFirot: stands in the Sept., pas- sim, for 5'n, as well as for "piPl (see Schleusner, Lex. V. T. s. V. Kj/roc). Admiral Snij'th, in the chapter on Ichtliyology, in his Mediterranean, p. 190, says the •white sliark has been called ^ ^ Jonce piscis" from its transcendent claim "to have been the great jish that swallowed the prophet, since he can readily ingulf a man whole." l""or more on tlie subject of tliis fish, see Kitto, B'lhl. Illustr. vi, 39!)- 40-1, and Jonah. 9. Of To- bit's fisli, 0. F. Fritzschc, in his commentary on the passage (Tobit \'\,jMssini) enumerates nine or ten spec- ulations by different writers. According to Bochart and Helvigius, the Silwiis has the best claim. This the former describes as "being very large, of great strength and boldness, and ever ready to attack other animals, even men, an inhabitant of the* rivers F^u- phrates and Tigris." C. II. Smith, in the first edition of Kitto's Cyclopcedia, combats Bochart's conclusions,