This act of consumption rendered the medjed simultaneously taboo and sacred. Because it had ingested a portion of a god, the fish was considered untouchable as food within its cult city. The inhabitants of Per-Medjed/Oxyrhynchus held the medjed in special veneration; the fish was not eaten, and archaeological evidence includes bronze figurines of the medjed wearing divine attributes such as the horned sun-disc crown associated with Isis-Hathor. These figurines confirm that the fish itself was treated as a divine entity.

The myth has a practical theological consequence. Since Osiris's penis could not be recovered, Isis was compelled to fashion a replacement phallus - typically described as fashioned from gold - in order to complete Osiris's mummification and enable his posthumous conception of their son Horus. The medjed's consumption thus becomes the narrative pivot that necessitates Isis's creative intervention and Horus's miraculous birth, linking the fish to the central dynastic myth of Egyptian kingship.

The city of Oxyrhynchus, despite its fame in modern scholarship for the papyrus discoveries that yielded important Greco-Roman literary and Christian texts, remained throughout antiquity a centre of fish veneration. Greek and Roman sources noted the Egyptian taboo against eating the oxyrhynchus fish, and the city's very name preserved this cultic identity into the Christian era - a remarkable continuity of sacred geography.