Galilee Boat

A Drought, Two Brothers and a Race Against the Water

The winter of 1985-86 was dry, and the Sea of Galilee fell far enough to expose stretches of lakebed that had been under water for two thousand years. In January 1986, M. and Y. Lufan, two brothers from Kibbutz Ginosar who fished the lake and hunted the shore for antiquities, saw the outline of a hull in the mud near Magdala and reported it. The Israel Department of Antiquities sent S. Wachsmann, its inspector of underwater antiquities. What followed was a rescue excavation carried out around the clock over roughly a fortnight, with the water expected back and news of the find already out; the accounts differ on whether it took ten, eleven or twelve days, which tells you something about the conditions.

Waterlogged ancient wood has the consistency of wet cardboard and disintegrates as it dries. The crew dug the hull free by hand, wrapped it in fibreglass and polyurethane foam so that the whole shell became buoyant, and floated it along the shore to Kibbutz Ginosar. It then sat in a chemical bath for over a decade while polyethylene glycol, a synthetic wax, slowly replaced the water in the cell walls. It went on permanent display in 2000 in the Yigal Allon Museum at Ginosar, under the name the museum gave it: the Ancient Galilee Boat. The full excavation report fills a whole volume of the journal 'Atiqot.

What a Hull Tells You That a Text Cannot

The boat is about 8.2 m long and 2.3 m wide, built shell-first with mortise-and-tenon joinery in the Mediterranean manner, and patched together from several different species of timber — a sign of scarce or salvaged wood, and of a hull repaired over a long working life. Radiocarbon puts it at about 40 BC give or take eighty years. Pottery found with it, the nails, and the construction technique point to somewhere in the range 50 BC to AD 50, and the wear suggests it stayed in service for decades before it was stripped of anything reusable and left in the shallows.

That is the kind of boat the Gospels are describing. It carried a crew of perhaps five, with room for a dozen or so people; it could be worked with oars and carried a sail; and it had a small raised stern deck, which is the detail readers reach for, because Mark 4:38 puts Jesus asleep in the stern on a cushion while the storm fills the boat. The value of the find is that it converts a set of scenes people picture vaguely into an object with dimensions. When Mark 1 has two pairs of brothers leave their nets and their father in the boat with the hired men, this is roughly the vessel and roughly the size of operation being abandoned.

It Is Not the Jesus Boat

The name almost everyone knows it by was not chosen by anyone who excavated it. Once word spread that a first-century boat had surfaced on the shore where Jesus taught, the international press dubbed it the Jesus Boat, and the label stuck to guidebooks, tour signage and a good deal of merchandise. The excavation report calls it an ancient boat from the Sea of Galilee. The museum that owns it calls it the Ancient Galilee Boat. This article uses those names for the same reason they do.

Nothing ties this hull to Jesus or to any person named in the Gospels. There is no inscription, no cargo, no wreck event, nothing that connects it to a narrated moment. The lake supported a substantial fishing industry with a fleet of such boats, of which this is the one that happened to be buried in mud rather than rotting away. The odds against any single surviving hull being one named in a text are enormous, and no one involved in the excavation has ever claimed otherwise. What the boat establishes is a type, not an incident.

One smaller caution, since the app cites the museum's own page. That page says the boat is made of twelve kinds of wood, all of them mentioned in the Bible. Published counts of the species differ between accounts, and the second half of the sentence is a devotional gloss rather than a finding: the woods are what a Galilean boatwright could get hold of, and the Bible mentions a great many trees. None of this touches the boat's real interest, which does not need the help.

Scripture references

• Mark 1:16-20 — Two pairs of fishing brothers, their nets, and the boat they leave behind
• Mark 4:35-41 — The storm, and Jesus asleep in the stern
• Luke 5:1-11 — Teaching from a boat pushed out from shore, and the catch that nearly sinks two of them
• John 21:3 — Peter goes fishing again after the resurrection

Sources

• Holding institutionYigal Allon Museum, Kibbutz Ginosar — The Ancient Boat — Beit Yigal Allon, Kibbutz Ginosar · The holding museum's own page: found January 1986 by the Lufan brothers after the drought, excavated by the antiquities authority, conserved on site and moved to the display gallery in 2000Supports: Discovery, conservation, current location, and the museum's own name for the object
• ScholarshipS. Wachsmann (ed.), The Excavations of an Ancient Boat from the Sea of Galilee (Lake Kinneret) — Shelley Wachsmann and colleagues · 'Atiqot 19 (Israel Antiquities Authority, 1990) — an entire volume of the excavation journal given over to the boat. Print-only; no free URL existsSupports: The excavation, construction, dating evidence and the report's own naming of the object
• ScholarshipS. Wachsmann, The Sea of Galilee Boat — Shelley Wachsmann, Texas A&M University · Ed Rachal Foundation Nautical Archaeology Series, Texas A&M University Press, 2009 (first published 1995) — the excavator's book-length account, including the press reaction during the digSupports: The circumstances of the excavation and the origin of the popular nickname
• EncyclopediaWikipedia: Sea of Galilee Boat

Further reading

• Yigal Allon Museum, Kibbutz Ginosar: The Ancient Boat
• Wikipedia: Sea of Galilee Boat

Reflect

This is roughly the boat four fishermen walked away from. What would it cost you to leave your own livelihood on the shore?