Is the Sea of Galilee a lake?

Why the Gospels say “sea”

Hebrew has one word, yam, for any big body of water. It covers the Mediterranean, the Dead Sea and even the great bronze basin in Solomon’s Temple, which 1 Kings 7:23 calls “the molten sea.” Mark, Matthew and John, thinking in that idiom, wrote the Greek word for sea, thalassa. Luke, writing for Greek readers, uses limnē, lake, every time, and never once calls it a sea.

Now while the multitude pressed on him and heard the word of God, he was standing by the lake of Gennesaret.

Luke has the geography right. The Jordan flows in at the north end, fed by springs at the foot of Mount Hermon, and flows out at the south, down to the Dead Sea, which really is salt. The water in between is fresh enough to drink and to farm with.

One lake, four names

• Kinneret. The Hebrew Bible’s name, “the sea of Chinnereth” (Numbers 34:11), shared with a fortified town on its shore (Joshua 19:35). A popular explanation links it to kinnor, a harp, for the lake’s shape. Israelis still call it Yam Kinneret.
• Gennesaret. First the fertile plain on the northwest shore (Mark 6:53), then the lake beside it, as in 1 Maccabees 11:67 and Luke.
• Sea of Galilee. The usual name in Mark and Matthew (Mark 1:16; Matthew 4:18), after the region around it.
• Sea of Tiberias. John’s name (John 6:1; 21:1), after the city Herod Antipas founded on the west shore around AD 19. In Arabic it is still the lake of Tiberias.

How big, how deep, how low

The lake covers about 166 square kilometers (64 square miles), and its deepest point is about 43 meters (141 feet) down. Josephus, who commanded the Jewish forces in Galilee in AD 66–67, gives it as 140 stadia long and 40 wide, and praises its sweet water and its many kinds of fish (Jewish War 3.506–508).

Its surface sits about 210 meters below sea level, rising and falling with the winter rains and the years of drought. That makes it the lowest freshwater lake in the world, and the second-lowest lake of any kind, after the Dead Sea. Since 1964 Israel’s National Water Carrier has drawn on it to send water south to farms and cities.

Storms in a deep bowl

The lake lies in a deep basin ringed by hills, and cool air from the heights can pour down onto the warm water with little warning. That is the setting of the storm stories.

A big wind storm arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so much that the boat was already filled.

Luke says the storm “came down on the lake” (Luke 8:23), a fair description of a wind that drops from the hills.

The shore in Jesus’s day

Fishing towns ringed the water: Capernaum on the north shore, Jesus’s base; Bethsaida near the Jordan inlet; Magdala on the west; royal Tiberias; and Gentile towns of the Decapolis across on the east. Jesus pronounced woes on three of them, Chorazin, Bethsaida and Capernaum (Matthew 11:21–23).

In January 1986, during a drought, two brothers from Kibbutz Ginosar spotted the outline of a wooden boat in the mud of the shore. It dates from around the first century BC or AD, is about 8 meters (27 feet) long, and is now displayed at the kibbutz. Visitors who eat by the lake today are often served tilapia, sold as St. Peter’s fish, after the fish with a coin in its mouth (Matthew 17:27).