Classed with murderers and robbers (m. Ned. 3:4), tax collectors were hated in the Jewish world, as are informants in totalitarian societies today. Customs were not collected by civil servants but by tax collectors who leased rights to assess customs in a particular district. Jericho was a large city on Judea’s eastern frontier where customs would have been levied. As “chief tax collector,” Zacchaeus evidently oversaw the customs franchise there. Luke’s final description of Zacchaeus is “wealthy.
