20 Surprisingly Ordinary Jobs Held By People In The Bible

Benaiah, son of Jehoiada, was chief of the Cherethites and the Pelethites, King David’s elite bodyguard. He later executed Adonijah, Joab, and Shimei at Solomon’s command, and was then promoted to commander-in-chief of Israel’s entire army.

Nehemiah was no mere waiter seeking gratuities. In fact, around 445 BCE, he served as the royal cupbearer to King Artaxerxes I of Persia, in the city of Susa. His responsibility included ensuring that no one approached the king’s throne without permission and making certain the king’s wine and food were not poisoned. It was his close proximity to the king that ultimately enabled him to request authorization to restore Jerusalem’s walls.

Hiram was a Tyrian-Israelite master bronze founder working for King Solomon, ca. 960 BCE. Hiram was sent to Solomon by King Hiram of Tyre, a different man who shared his name and who also supplied cedar and cypress timber, gold, stonemasons, carpenters, and sailors. He worked at an industrial clay foundry in the Jordan Valley, where he pit-cast his two free-standing, hollow bronze pillars, twenty-seven feet high, and the giant “Molten Sea” basin, which could hold more than 10,000 gallons of water.

Sometime around 35 to 40 CE, there was a man called Simon who owned a hide-tanning shop on the outskirts of Joppa. Tanning, which relied on the use of urine, lime and dog dung to convert animal skins into leather, was a rather malodorous undertaking. For this reason, tanneries were generally situated beside the sea, where there was ready access to water, and also to keep the noxious smell away from the city. Anyone working with skins was considered ceremonially unclean under Jewish law. The Apostle Peter stayed with Simon anyway.

In Joshua 2:6, Rahab, a woman living in the city of Jericho, hides the Israelite spies under stalks of flax she has spread out to dry on her roof. Some scholars think the flax on her roof points to Rahab being involved in linen production. Yet, the Hebrew source uses the word zonah for her, which means prostitute. Later sources such as the Aramaic Targum (an ancient Aramaic translation and interpretation of the Hebrew Bible) and the Greek-writing historian Josephus changed it to simply an innkeeper, saying Rahab kept an inn within the city walls of Jericho.

Shiphrah and Puah were professional Hebrew midwives, well-trained to assist women in childbirth on a birthstool. When Pharaoh instructed them to kill every newborn boy they encountered, they told him that the Hebrews gave birth so fast that by the time the king’s men could be summoned, the child was already out. He believed them.

Amos was not a prophet at first; he was a herdsman and a dresser of sycamore figs in Tekoa around 760 to 750 BCE. The sycamore fig, a Levantine fruit tree unrelated to the sycamores of America’s hardwood forests, needed its fruits to be lanced or nicked to release the gas inside and make them soft enough to ripen. This was labor-intensive, specialized farm work.

In 55 CE, a local craftsman named Demetrius made his money manufacturing shrines of Artemis for sale to tourists and pilgrims in the Greek city of Ephesus. But after the early Christian missionary Paul began to preach against the practice of idol-making, the local business began to dry up. Demetrius organized his fellow craftsmen and stirred them into a fervor against Christianity; the ensuing protest culminated in a riot in the city’s 25,000-seat theater.

Originally from Thyatira, Lydia was a dealer in purple cloth at Philippi, ca. 50, made from the rare murex sea snail, one of the most expensive substances in the Roman Empire. A successful businesswoman and head of household, she is recorded as Europe’s first Christian convert.

Joseph obtained his position as the grand vizier of the Pharaoh (essentially his highest-ranking official) by his ability to interpret dreams, correctly foretelling seven years of plenty followed by seven years of famine. During those seven years of plenty, Joseph set up national granaries and saved the grain. Furthermore, he charged a 20 percent tax on all grain harvests for those seven years. When the famine struck, Joseph distributed the grain from the granaries. Eventually, Joseph acquired money, cattle, property, and even people’s labor for the Pharaoh. This shifted the distribution of property rights, and it was Joseph’s fiscal policy that ultimately saved Egypt from the famine.

In about 27-30 CE, Matthew (Levi) owned a toll booth in Capernaum and collected tariffs from the merchants on behalf of the local ruler, Herod Antipas. The town was a busy one, as the Via Maris, a major international trading route, passed through. Merchants on the road had to pay the toll for the right to travel the route. Like most tax collectors, he was despised by Jews as a collaborator with the Romans.

Deborah is described in the Book of Judges as a prophet and judge of Israel. Before Deborah helped Barak take charge of the armies of Israel, she was a civil judge in Israel on her own. From roughly 1200-1150 BCE, she held court under a palm tree, sitting between Ramah and Bethel. The people of Israel would come to her with their civil and criminal grievances, and she would hear them.

A man named Erastus is mentioned in Paul’s letter to the Romans as “the city treasurer [or public works manager] of Corinth” (ca. 50-60 CE). An inscription in Latin on a pavement in the Corinth area, discovered by archaeologists in 1929, tells us that an official paid to pave a public square under his own name. We don’t know if his title is equivalent to Erastus’s Greek one, but it looks likely.

Tertullus was a professional advocate hired by Jerusalem’s high priest to prosecute Paul the Apostle before the Roman governor Felix at Caesarea about 57 to 59 CE. He began his address in the customary style with its obsequious flattery and continued with charges against Paul that he was a seditious man, a leader of a dangerous cult, and a blasphemer of the temple. As a Roman provincial trial, the case was decided by a single judge: Felix himself.

The Torah (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible) describes how Bezalel was chosen to design and build the wilderness Tabernacle (the Israelites’ portable sanctuary) (Exodus 35-36). He was a master craftsman in charge of carpentry, gem-setting, tapestry work, and goldsmithing. He built the Ark as well as the holy altars. One man handled multiple crafts for one monumental task.

When King David and the people who were with him fled from the uprising of his son Absalom (ca. 980 BCE), they needed supplies. Barzillai the Gileadite, then eighty years old, brought beds, basins, and earthen vessels, along with wheat and barley, meal and parched grain, beans and lentils, honey and curds, sheep and cheese, for them to eat.

Potiphar was Pharaoh’s chief of security. He commanded the bodyguards protecting the king himself, and he ran the state jail for high-profile prisoners. He bought Joseph as a slave and later made him manager of his household, but eventually locked him up in prison on his wife’s charges.

In about 445 BCE, Nehemiah oversaw the restoration of the city walls of Jerusalem. One portion of this was given to Shallum, ruler of half the district of Jerusalem. He rebuilt that section with the help of his daughters.

Paul was taught by Gamaliel, a Jewish teacher. Sometime around 50-52 CE, he moved to Corinth and made tents from goat hair and leather fabric that he cut and sewed in collaboration with Priscilla and Aquila, both of whom were also tentmakers. He could then support himself while visiting and teaching the local people.

The Bible does call Luke “the beloved physician” in Colossians 4:14, and Christian tradition identifies him as an educated traveler with the Apostle Paul who penned both the Gospel according to Luke and the Acts of the Apostles sometime between 50 and 80 CE. In 1882, a scholar named W.K. Hobart argued that Luke’s vocabulary revealed extensive knowledge of medical terminology, but in 1920, Harvard historian Henry Cadbury argued that it didn’t. While the linguistic evidence wasn’t there, the occupation itself was real.

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