The extracts below are from John Kloppenborg’s paper, “Jesus, Fishermen and Tax Collectors.” See the PDF in his directory in DropBox. He stresses that there are few records or indicators of how the fishing industry operated in Palestine although there are good records along the Nile. He combined how it operated there with what is known about Palestine. An example is when Simon and James left the father in the boat with the hired help.
[See his question in the last paragraph below about comparing the industry in Egypt with Galilee. What I do not find him mentioning is that Egypt controlled the Levant for centuries, admittedly long before Jesus’s time, but even so, the business operational culture of Egypt likely persisted. He does address (see pg. 577 of his paper) the Ptolemies’ control and early Roman industry business practices in Palestine.]
What material conditions might impinge on fishing? Fishing required a considerable infrastructure: boats and the ability to repair them; the manufacture and repair of nets; access to lead for net weights; stone sinkers and anchors; flotation devices for nets; iron or bronze hooks; ropes; baskets or jars for transporting the catch; transport animals; and processing or sales facilities. It also required the use of the many various moles that have been detected along the Kinneret and legal access to the shoreline from which boats and nets could be launched. Some of these materials were either not locally available or required specialized manufacture. This meant that fishermen were necessarily entangled with other productive and commercial networks and hence, with the craftsmen who worked in those industries.
We should assume, for example, that fishing boats were not manufactured by the fishermen themselves but by shipwrights and then either sold them to the fishermen or to some fishing contractor.
Locations of Tax info in the paper:
- Taxes on Fishing -pg 584
- Shore Fisherman – potential taxing per length of bank? pg 586
- Boat Taxes pg 588
- Lease of fishing rights, pg 590
Werner Wuellner’s classic study on Mark 1:16-20 offered a very different picture. Within the sub-elite population one must differentiate between tenant farmers, unskilled labourers (including some fishermen), “serfs”, and hired hands on the one hand, and on the other, artisans, craftsmen, small businessmen, and fishermen who owned their own boats, nets, and equipment. These latter fishermen signed fishing contracts with those who held fishing rights, paid wages to the hired help, and interacted with those who collected taxes. Indeed, they should be seen as involved in a “big business” that required capitalization and had the potential to make some of those engaged in fishing moderately wealthy”. Mark’s mention of presence
of hired workers left with the elder Zebedee in Mark 1.
In addition to boats and nets, fishermen required net weights, usually made from either lead (fig. 2) or stone that had been drilled. Since lead was not indigenous to Palestine it had to be imported from various mediterranean sites as far away as Spain. Sheets of unprocessed lead have been found in shipwrecks near Haifa along with moulds for casting net weights, which implies that the casting of net weights was done in Palestine by smithies. Marine archaeology has also produced other fishing paraphernalia, including grapnels for retrieving lost gear and sounding weights used to determine water depth (both made of lead), and salvage rings made of either stone or lead3! Net mending tools and hooks were of bronze, and these along with baskets or jars for the transport of fish were all likely of local manufacture.
We might also note that different types of nets had differing manpower requirements: a cast net could be operated by two or three fishermen from a boat, but a seine net, which could be 250-300 metres long, might require 6-20 men to bring it to shore (figs. 3 and 4). Thus, we can begin to assemble a picture of the variety of connections and the various productive and labour networks that supplied the fishing industry with its essential tools. The call stories in Mark 1:18-20 and Luke 5 do not draw any attention to the networks that the first four followers of Jesus abandoned, at least so the story goes; but an understanding of the material necessities of fishing indicate that the industry was at the centre of a large and complex productive network.
I have lingered over these details because they help to underscore the strong social, administrative, economic, and legal ties that fishermen had. Fishermen were firmly anchored in a network of suppliers of materials – boats, linen, nets, sinkers, pottery, baskets, hooks and net tools. If they operated seine or drag nets, they had to have access to a larger labour force in order to bring in the catch. They were bound in economic relationships to local administrators who kept track of the fishermen in their area and expected yearly payment of boat taxes. While they were fishing they were surveilled by the tax supervisors or the lessor’s agents who had an interest in taking note of the size of daily catches. Their leases bound them in legal relationships to lessors that prohibited them from abandoning their fishing lease before its prescribed termination.
Were Galilean fishermen like those we know from Egypt? Probably not in all respects. But it would seem rather unlikely that the fishing industry in the Galilee was entirely unregulated and free from the kinds of legal and administrative surveillance that was characteristic of Egypt and richly evidenced in contemporary documentary papyri. At a minimum we have to assume that fishing rights were owned either by Herod Antipas [See post here about John D. Crossan’s many discussions about the Herod Antipas’s taking over the fishing industry] and Herod Philip or by large landowners, and then leased to fishermen, in particular in the northern area of the Kinneret from Taricheae and Gergesa and especially around Heptapegon and the shelf in front of Bethsaida, which are the most productive parts of the lake. Access to these parts of the lake was likely granted through the control of the various moles [see paragraph below] whose positions were mapped when the Kinneret dropped below -211.5 meters. The lessors of these rights naturally had an interest in monitoring the size of the daily catches so as to ensure that the lessor received the value of the catch stipulated by the lease – probably not much less than one-half of the catch, and perhaps as much as three-quarters87. It is also a priori likely that local administrators had likewise an interest in the tax revenue that was generated by fishing. Whether Galilee had adopted the regime of reporting the catch every five days is unknown, but that either the fishermen themselves, or an administrative agent would produce a daily log of casts similar to that of P.Oxy XLIX 3495 is entirely plausible, especially given the perishable nature of fish.
What is a Mole? Response is from Claude.ai.
In this context, a “mole” refers to a stone pier or breakwater — a man-made structure built out from the shoreline into the water, typically used as a landing or launching point for boats, or to create a sheltered harbor area.
Kloppenborg’s point is that when the water level of the Kinneret dropped significantly in the 1970s (to –211.5 metres below sea level), these ancient stone structures became visible above the waterline, allowing archaeologists to map where they had been built along the shore. This in turn revealed likely locations of ancient harbors and boat-launch points — particularly important for identifying which areas were being actively used for fishing in the first century, and therefore which stretches of shoreline would have been most economically valuable and most likely subject to controlled access and leasing arrangements.
The practical significance for Kloppenborg’s argument is that these moles suggest organized, infrastructure-supported fishing operations rather than casual or unregulated activity. Someone — most plausibly Herod Antipas or large landowners — would have controlled access to these fixed landing points, reinforcing his broader case that Galilean fishing was embedded in legal and administrative networks of leasing and taxation much like what the Egyptian papyri document.
