John 6-7

A Handbook on the Gospel of John John 6:9

Barley bread was the ordinary food of the poor, since it was cheaper than wheat bread.

Luke 11:5 NKJV

And He said to them, “Which of you shall have a friend, and go to him at midnight and say to him, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves;

200 Denarii equals half a years salary

A Handbook on the Gospel of John John 6:9

Originally the word translated fish (Greek opsarion) meant cooked food eaten with bread.

Let’s do some estimating (and focus only on the bread):

5000 men + one women and one child per man = 15,000 people.Each person eats about 3 small loaves and two small fish

45,000 loaves.  30,000 small fish or sardines. That is a lot.  

Here’s how much: 45,000 small loaves of bread would fill up about 1.2 semi-truck trailers. And 3,750 lbs of fish, let alone that each fish was dried, which takes at least 3 days.

This is amazing:  Jesus makes over a semi-load of bread appear from nowhere!  Truly Jesus is the Son of God!

Cooked in a Tannur oven.

12 baskets full. Basket was about 92 liters or 24 gallons or 200 lbs. 288 gallons or 1,660 lbs.

Galilee is 7 miles wide, and 13 miles long.

They were mid-way. 6.33 miles from Tiberias to Capernaum/ 10 miles by foot.

A Handbook on the Gospel of John John 7:37–39

By New Testament times the Festival of Shelters had become the occasion for prayers for rain. The feast was celebrated at the end of September or early October; if rain came at that time, it was taken as a guarantee that there would be sufficient rain for the crops. The prayer for rain was symbolized in dramatic fashion on each of the seven days of the festival. A procession would go down to the Gihon spring on the southeast side of the Temple hill. There a priest would fill a golden pitcher with water, and the choir would repeat the words of Isaiah 12:3,

“With joy you will draw water from the well of salvation” (RSV). Then the procession would go up to the Temple through the water gate. When the crowd reached the altar in front of the Temple, they would go around waving the lulab with their right hands and the ethrog with their left hands. The lulab consisted of willow twigs and myrtle tied together with palm, and the ethrog could be either a lemon or a citron. As a climax, the priest would go up the ramp to the altar and pour the water into a silver funnel, through which it would flow to the ground

Barclay Moon Newman and Eugene Albert Nida, A Handbook on the Gospel of John, UBS Handbook Series (New York: United Bible Societies, 1993), 244.