Fishermen’s House
It seems likely that what were originally large estate houses perhaps reserved for high-ranking military veterans of the Syrian Wars, were later converted into guild houses given the diverse sorts of artifacts found in and around them. As a result, the houses have been given names corresponding to associated finds. For example, “the Fisherman’s House” is so named because of the heavy basalt anchors, fishing hooks, lead weights, sewing needles, and the like found within it (the nets, of course, did not survive). Excavators believe an inside wall likely framed the staircase leading to an upper story of the house. Along the eastern wall of the courtyard, which measures 18 m x 27 m, is a spacious kitchen, roughly 4.5 m x 13.5 m in size, which contains the remains of two ovens. A small storage room, lacking an entrance and in a very poor state of preservation, is located at the southern end of the kitchen.
All Hellenistic-Roman architectural assemblages in Area B were found in a poor state of preservation, their western walls having suffered greatest ruin. The western side of the Fisherman’s House shows the extent to which these Hellenistic-Roman walls have been disturbed over roughly two millennia by forces both natural and human. The walls at the eastern side of the Fisherman’s House suffered slightly less destruction than the western walls. Some of these walls were built directly atop earlier IA walls and are preserved to a height of about 1.3 m—in comparison with the western walls, where in some places only a single course of stones and masonry remains. Despite the overall poor state of preservation, a significant amount of Late Hellenistic-Early Roman pottery was recovered from the house. Coins have also been found in the house, including two silver didrachma bearing the likeness of the Seleucid ruler Demetrius II Nicator (reigned 145-139 and 129-125 BCE).
Given the size of the house, with its number of upper and lower rooms and kinds of finds, one cannot help but be drawn into speculation about the personal and professional lives of the fishermen of Bethsaida during the Hellenistic-Roman period, people who figured prominently in stories about the formation of the community centered around the life and activities of Jesus of Nazareth.