Fisheries of Palestine, With Their Products

AQUATIC ANIMALS.

"The Holy Land" is strictly an inland tract of mountains, for the Israelites had no possessions on the coast, the one part of which belonged to the Ph�nicians, the other to the Philistines, whose chief god was Dagon, having the face and hands of a man, the body of a fish (1 Sam. v. 4).

Their one river is the Jordan, too rapid, too muddy, too deep in its hot rocky bed for angling to be either pleasurable or profitable. The smaller streams (Kishon and Jabbok) were on the confines, and were alternately dry and rushing torrents. Of its three lakes, the largest (the Dead Sea) was almost entirely destitute of all life, animal and vegetable (with the exception, it is said, of some molluscs,�Sargus salvianus and Melanopsis); so that the only fishing preserves were the Lake of Gennesaret and the pools of Heshbon (Cant. vii. 4). We learn that they used both a drag-net and a hook for catching them (Is. xix. 8).

Beyond mention of the fact of the creation of fish generally, and the Mosaic division of their species into the clean and unclean, and their incidental mention in our Lord's history as an article of food, and of the occupation of fishing as a parabolic illustration, fish enter but little into the phraseology of the Bible, and not a single species is named, if we except the whale. Josephus notices that the species found in the Jordan and Lake of Gennesaret are identical with those in the Nile. Recent explorers have confirmed that opinion, and found some that belong only to the African families. They are chiefly of the bream, carp, and perch tribes, the shoals of which, coming up at night to the mouths of the warm springs of the two Bethsaidas, are most extraordinary, often thickly covering an acre of water. The Siluroids were held by Egyptians, as well as Hebrews, to be unfit for food, on sanitary grounds. The following Table will show the extent of the Palestine fisheries, and the species recently found.

FISHERIES OF PALESTINE, WITH THEIR PRODUCTS.

N.B.�T.=Tristram; H.=Houghton; R.=Rolleston.

Waters.	English Name.	Ichthyological Species.	Remarks.
Gennesaret, L.	Bream. Sheat-fish.	Chromis Nilotica. H. Clarias macracanthus. T. Coracinus. T.	The Siluroids are unfit for food, and are the "bad fish cast away" by the fishermen (Matt. xiii. 47, 48.).
	�	Hemichromis. T.	Unknown to science, but found by Livingstone in S.E. Africa.
	Carp. Perch. Dog-fish.	Labeo barbus canis. H.	�
Jabbok, R.	Barbel.	Barbus longiceps.	The Jabbok swarms with fish, swimming in a continuous line, coming and going. T.
Jordan, R.	Minnow. Barbel. Bream.	Cyprinodon Hammonis. H.	These all die on reaching the Dead Sea, where they are devoured by the birds waiting for them (see Ezek. xlvii. 10).
Kishon, R.	Blenny.	Blennius lupulus.	Fewer fish in the streams flowing westward than in those flowing eastward.