Jewish Tuna and Christian Fish: Identifying Religious Affiliation in Epigraphic Sources

Abstract

In his collection of Jewish inscriptions, Jean-Baptiste Frey identifies as Jewish a stone fragment that contains no writing, but only depictions of an amphora, several birds, a branch of a plant, numerous circular objects with smaller circles within them, and one drawing of a fish. Frey considers the amphora to be an oil jar; the birds to be doves and a goose; the plant branch to be thelulavassociated with the Jewish festival of Sukkoth; the circles to bemasot; and the fish to be the tuna that Jews are said to have eaten on Friday nights and on various Jewish festivals. The stone bears no irrefutably Christian symbols, such as a chi rho, but neither does it bear such things as a seven-branched menorah, which virtually all scholars accept as an explicit Jewish symbol. Frey even speculates that were the stone complete, it would probably be found to include a seven-branched menorah.