Right up front, Luke tells us two key pieces of information about Zacchaeus. He was a chief tax collector, and he was rich. These two facts were not unrelated. Zacchaeus was rich because he was the chief tax collector of the region.
Let’s review some of what it meant for Zacchaeus to be a tax collector in Roman Palestine and, more specifically, to be the chief tax collector in Jericho. Some of what all this might have meant will have to be a bit speculative. The Romans were pragmatists about the way they managed their empire. They knew how to adjust their approach to local realities. We know a lot about the Roman approach to collecting taxes from the conquered peoples in their empire, but the system varied a good bit both from region to region and from one period of time to another.
Siphoning revenues out of their conquered territories was a core priority in Roman imperial administration. The process was sometimes referred to as “tax farming.” Roman imperial officials, however, were almost never directly involved in collecting taxes. Rather, they used a sort of franchise system.
Roman authorities would generally take bids from local residents for the right to collect taxes from a particular region. The bids would usually be for a certain period, and the winner would be tasked with collecting a set amount of revenue from their assigned area. That revenue goal was set by the Roman authorities, and the franchisee was often required to pay as much as half that amount up front from their own resources with a contractual requirement to pay the remainder by the end of the franchise period. The franchisees would then reimburse themselves by extracting taxes and fees from the residents of their assigned region and from traders who did business in the marketplaces.
This practice of requiring front money in order to win a franchise meant that generally franchises went to bidders who were already wealthy. And, because, as we shall see, tax farming franchises tended to be very lucrative for franchise holders, once an individual or a family won a tax collection franchise, they put themselves in a financial position to hold onto it over time, sometimes for generations. The fact that Zacchaeus is referred to as a “chief tax collector” suggests that he may have managed to win more than one franchise, which he then sub-franchised out to others, with the understanding that he would take a cut from the revenues of any sub-contracted regions.
The Roman authorities imposed a variety of types of taxes and fees on the residents and merchants of their territories. There were per capita taxes, land taxes, marketplace taxes. Taxes were also charged on commodities that were transported from one region to another, a serious additional burden to farmers, fishermen, and craftsmen who produced enough to sell more widely than just in their local marketplace. Sometimes, tax collectors were empowered to stop commercial travelers, search their merchandise, and confiscate anything that was not properly declared.
On top of the Roman tax burden, Jews in Palestine faced an additional layer of tax. They were expected to pay an annual temple tax, a tithe on their produce or income, and the special firstfruits offering. One source estimates that “the average Jewish farmer could have easily paid up to 35-40 percent of his annual income in taxes” of various kinds both Roman and Jewish taxes.[1]
Typically, the Roman tax rates would only be known to the tax collectors. As result, there was a lot of room for tax skimming by tax collectors. In fact, tax skimming was part of the system. Everyone understood that. As we’ve seen already, the Roman authorities did not pay the tax collectors. It was the other way around, the tax collectors paid for the privilege of collecting taxes. The only way for tax collectors to make money was to extract it from the taxpayers. They did that by simply requiring taxpayers to pay more than the Romans expected to receive from the tax collector.
Let’s put it in terms of American dollars. Let’s say that the Romans expected to receive $100,000 in taxes from a particular region. The tax collector responsible for that region would simply make sure that he collected $150,000 from his region. He would then pay the Romans the required $100,000 and keep the $50,000 for himself. In this example, every tax payer in this region would be paying 150% of their required taxes.
Of course, that example assumes that the tax collector chooses to spread the pain out evenly across the residents of his region. But of course, there were incentives for him not to do that. He might want to curry favor from the rich and powerful residents of the community, he might choose to charge them less than they owed and make up the difference by charging the less powerful members of the community 200% of what they owed.
Again, because only the tax collector knew how much the Romans were expecting him to collect, he could fudge people’s tax bills pretty much any way he wanted. Taxpayers had little recourse if they thought that their individual tax bill was higher than it should be. As long as the tax collector paid the Romans what they wanted, he could do pretty much whatever he wanted.
In light of all this, it should understandable why I referred to Zacchaeus as a predator in my first post on this story in Luke 19. The fact that he was rich was proof that Zacchaeus used his position as a chief tax collector as a means of preying on his neighbors. He was powerful, and they were at his mercy. That alone would have made him a hated man in his region. But there were more reasons that just this that made him and all tax collectors a despised group in their communities.
Because they collaborated with the Roman conquerors and overlords, tax collectors were considered political traitors by their neighbors. And because Jewish tax collectors were required to have frequent close contact with Romans, who were pagan Gentiles, the Jewish religious authorities and their Jewish neighbors considered tax collectors to be religiously unclean. All of this made them outcasts in their own communities. We get a sense of that by how often we find the terms “tax collectors” and “sinners” linked together in the New Testament (for example, Matt. 9:10 & 11; Matt. 11:19; Lk. 7:34; Lk. 15:1).
All of this provides us with some understanding of just how shocking it was to everyone involved that Jesus would take the initiative to invite himself to dinner and a night’s lodging at Zacchaeus’s house. Zacchaeus was a vicious, predatory man, who successfully sucked the livelihood out of all his neighbors, a man who lived outside the religious life of the Jewish people and didn’t care about it. He acquired wealth and power and used that to abuse his own neighbors. He was justly hated by the community, though that certainly didn’t bother him. He was indeed “a wee little man,” as we so love to teach the kids in our vacation Bible schools and Sunday school classes. But that was the least important fact about who he was.
In my next post on Zacchaeus, we’ll think together about his encounter with Jesus and what it shows us about Jesus.
© 2024 Gary A. Chorpenning
Resources consulted for this post:
Kenneth E. Bailey, Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the Gospels. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic/InterVarsity Press, 2008.
William A. Simmons, Peoples of the New Testament World: An Illustrated Guide. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2008.
[1] William A. Simmons, Peoples of the New Testament World: An Illustrated Guide. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2008, page 100.
Related Posts on the Encounter between Jesus and Zacchaeus:
Bible Note #57: The Real Zacchaeus and That Terrible Children’s Song
Bible Note#58: Zacchaeus #2–Some Background
Bible Note #60: Zacchaeus #4–Getting into the Story–Jesus Make a Lot of People Mad
Bible Note #61: Zacchaeus #5–Why Would Such a Man Want to See Jesus?
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