Origin
The proverb’s earliest documented English appearance is in Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie’s 1885 novel Mrs. Dymond, where one character says of another: He certainly doesn’t practise his precepts, but I suppose the Patron meant that if you give a man a fish he is hungry again in an hour. If you teach him to catch a fish you do him a good turn. The phrase as a stand-alone aphorism developed from variants like this one over the following decades.
The proverb is frequently attributed online to Maimonides (the 12th-century Jewish philosopher) and to Chinese proverbial traditions (Lao Tzu, Confucius, or anonymous classical Chinese). None of these attributions has been traced to a verified primary source — neither in Maimonides’ surviving writings nor in classical Chinese texts.
The phrase is not in the Bible in any translation.
What the Bible says about provision
The Bible addresses poverty, provision, and care for the poor extensively but uses entirely different language and imagery. The Levitical gleaning laws (Leviticus 19:9-10, 23:22) require landowners to leave the edges of their fields unharvested so that the poor and the foreigner can gather food themselves — a structural provision-with-dignity model that has some thematic overlap with the proverb’s logic but no verbal or imagery connection to it.
The earliest church practice in Acts 4 records radical communal sharing of property. Proverbs treats generosity to the poor as a transaction in which the lender is the LORD (Proverbs 19:17). Matthew 25 describes the criterion of final judgement as treatment of the least of these. None of these texts uses fishing metaphors.
The proverb is good — it carries a serious idea about long-term welfare versus short-term aid. It is also not biblical. It is a modern educational saying that has, like many such sayings, accumulated a biblical-sounding patina through repeated misattribution.