Fish, Bread and 5,000 Men

The Fish: Two Shrunken Sardines
Galileans fished only three finned creatures out of the Sea of Galilee on a commercial scale: sardines, Galilean tilapia and carp (barbels). Salted sardines probably constituted our little boy’s “two small fish;” sardines were plentiful in the Sea of Galilee, a staple of the Galilean diet, cheap, packed well when preserved, and the smallest of the three species.

If this little boy was local, it’s quite likely that his father caught the sardines and his mother salted them; however, 5,000 men were not all local, and probability says he was from the interior. In this case his fish were probably caught by a fishermen along the western Galilee, shipped several miles to Magdala, home of Mary Magdalene, for salting and loaded onto a Jordan River trading ship or a merchant caravan bound for the interior. There they were bartered for goods such as grapes or textiles, put in a basket and saved for dinner.

St. Peter's fish, otherwise known as musht. See my blog on the Temple Tax Fish for more on that.

Preserving fish removed a lot of liquid and added substantial quantities of salt to compensate for the lack of refrigeration, yielding a shrunken fish with coarse texture and bumpy skin. To get an idea of what these dried out, salt-infested fish tasted like, grab some canned sardines off your grocery store shelf. (I tried salted sardines at a hotel restaurant in Israel, despite the waiter’s tip that Americans don’t usually like them. Ugh! Let’s just say he got a good laugh out of the expression on my face, and I received a fresh biblical revelation explaining why the little boy really gave his fish away!)

The Bread: Five Loaves of Barley Fodder
5 loaves of bread is a substantial exaggeration here – we’re not talking 5 loaves of sliced Arnold seven-grain purchased at your local Wegman’s. Nor are we talking bread baked at the village bakery, because anyone with the money to purchase bread wouldn’t have been eating barley bread.

The stone Jesus allegedly broke the bread on is at the back of the picture, fronted by a mosaic representing the two fish and five loaves of bread Jesus multiplied.

Barley was usually animal fodder, only eaten in bread form by extremely poor people or average peasants caught in a year of severe crop disease, drought or other cause of famine. Barley cost half as much as wheat in antiquity, but it wasn’t just your taste buds that suffered – barley is more difficult to digest and has far less nutritional value than wheat.

When I doggy-sat recently, I was too grossed out to put the spoon I’d used to scoop out the dog food – that moist stinky refrigerated stuff –in the sink, so I used a separate one every day and left a pile of fourteen dirty disgusting doggy-food-contaminated spoons in the mudroom for the family to clean up! But an American family so poor they bought a bag of Kibble for their dinners had no parallel in first-century Galilee, where animals generally ate the lowest grade of people food. Kind of like feeding Spot spam, in modern terms. Jesus wasn’t using unrealistic hyperbole in the parable of the prodigal son longing to fill his stomach with pig food; pigpen guarders, among others, really fell into an abyss of poverty that deep.

When our little boy finally received two fish back he probably ripped off a piece, slapped it on a piece of pita-shaped bread, smeared some fish sauce on it, stuffed a bite in his mouth and – some things never change – wiped the whole salty crumbly mess on his tunic.