Fishers of Fish and Fishers of Men: Fishing Imagery in the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East.

• Author: Hays, Christopher B.

Fishers of Fish and Fishers of Men: Fishing Imagery in the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East. By TYLER R. YODER. Explorations in Ancient Near Eastern Civilizations, vol. 4. Winona Lake, IN: EISENBRAUNS, 2016. Pp. xviii + 222, illus. $54.50.

The volume under review is a revision of the author's PhD dissertation written at Ohio State University. It is a welcome contribution; fishing has been studied in some detail in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamian contexts, but Yoder points out that its presence in Iron Age Israel and Judah has attracted much less attention. This is in part because fishing was a much smaller portion of the economy in the region; the majority of the fish consumed there often seems to have been imported. At the same time, however, this makes the subject a potentially interesting one for comparative analysis, since many of the motifs that make their way into classical Hebrew literature are drawn indirectly from the surrounding cultures.

The book opens with a concise and helpful review of scholarship. It then turns to method, paying special attention to recent metaphor theory. (It is a useful and up-to-date summary, though the details of literary theory are then mostly submerged during the analysis of texts--for better or worse, depending on a reader's interests.) This section is not overly long, and it would have been good to have some similar reflection on the author's understanding of myth theory.

Still in the first chapter, there follows a substantial section on the social history, ideology, and religious associations of fishing in the ancient Near East, moving from Egypt to Mesopotamia to the Levant. It is a good piece of work, and contains ample references to the existing literature for the reader who wants more detail or data. It is also the primary place in the book that employs iconographic data, though not the only one. It would have been feasible to compile more iconographic information and discuss it in more detail. As a co-chair for the ISBL iconography section, I am biased toward wishing for more such work in general.

The first chapter closes with an analysis of fishing terminology in the Hebrew Bible, with some attention to related terminology in other ancient Near Eastern languages. This builds on Shalom Paul's earlier article on fishing imagery in Amos 4:2. One of the methodological issues raised is that some terms used of fishing (e.g., those involving nets and spears) are also used of hunting, so that they...