Nazareth

We often think of Jesus' childhood village as Hicksville, Israel, but this was not an isolated prairie town. Galilee was a small area, and Nazareth was probably an integrated part of the regional system. It was roughly an hour outside of Sepphoris, the capital during Jesus’ childhood, and probably a satellite village of it. Sepphoris was rebuilt by King Herod Antipas in 19/20 A.D., and it's logical that Nazareth’s villagers played a key role in this rebuilding, and that Jesus worked on its carpentry - not necessarily by choice.

The suffix used for the word translated 'carpenter' in the Bible usually means woodwork but can also refer to masonry, and Nazareth may well have specialized in carpentry and stonework, using wood and limestone native to the area. If so their role in rebuilding Sepphoris may have contributed to the external framework of the major buildings as well as their internal woodwork.

It's possible that an aristocrat owned part or all of Nazareth - even that Nazareth had become part of his estate. While there was certainly strong animosity from the peasants toward the aristocracy, who taxed them brutally, this would have increased the resentment dramatically.

The Nazareth ridge, looking south across the Jezreel Valley to Judea.

Nazareth sat on a ridge overlooking the broad Jezreel Valley, which was a main trade route and a fertile area long occupied by the rich and royal. Jesus would have seen the caravans of Greece, Arabia and Egypt coming through the valley, and peddlers would have brought news. It's not by accident that the entire country and its neighboring friends and enemies knew about Jesus; people talked and news spread.

Away from the foreign ways of the pagan territory Capernaum bordered, things were probably more conservative and narrow-minded. Most likely people in Nazareth were engrained in their ancestral ways - probably the same as the ways of the people in the villages surrounding them. However, their location in Lower Galilee, close to the capital, probably made them more open-minded than the remote villages of mountainous Upper Galilee. The Sea of Galilee offered a more culturally exposed area than most of Galilee, and this may have something to do with why he chose it as his hometown during his ministry.

Matthew 4:13-16: Leaving Nazareth, he went and lived in Capernaum, which was by the lake in the area of Zebulun and Naphtali, to fulfill what was said through the prophet Isaiah: "Land of Zebulun and land of Naphtali, the way to the sea, along the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles - the people living in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned."

The Jews believed that tombs had to be outside of the town limits, and one scholar used the various groupings of tombs around ancient Nazareth to estimate the maximum population that could have lived inside it - approximately 400. Compare this to the size of your church!

Last Updated May 27, 2009