A Typical Village

Mark 1:36-39: Simon and his companions went to look for [Jesus], and when they found him, they exclaimed: "Everyone is looking for you!"

Jesus replied, "Let us go somewhere else—to the nearby villages—so I can preach there also. That is why I have come." So he traveled throughout Galilee, preaching in their synagogues and driving out demons.

Many villages specialized in an industry, such as sandal-making, household pottery, or millstones. Trade was organized around routes to the major towns and cities, and each city had 'daughter villages,' also known as satellite villages, surrounding it. For example, Shihin was a satellite village of Sepphoris, specializing in pottery, and the city residents got much of their pottery from Shihin.

There were probably peddlers coming through, often people that had been taxed off of their land entirely and traveled for a living. These people would have brought goods, news, and probably messages, from one hamlet to another. It is likely that these peddlers would eventually sink another level and become day laborers, the wandering homeless searching for seasonal work that would provide beds and food, or daily work that offered no protection.

Many towns were 'owned' by wealthy city residents, who had lent the peasants money to pay their exorbitant taxes and subsequently confiscated their houses for failing to pay the rent. The peasant was now a tenant on his ancestral land.

Loyal to Their Land
I Kings 21:2-3 demonstrates a peasants loyalty to his land during King Ahab’s reign of Israel in the ninth century B.C. While cultures change substantially in nine centuries, both were agrarian societies based on the Old Testament and it’s worth a look:

Ahab said to Naboth: “Let me have your vineyard to use for a vegetable garden, since it is close to my palace. In exchange I will give you a better vineyard or, if you prefer, I will pay you whatever it is worth.”

But Naboth replied: “The Lord forbid that I should give you the inheritance of my fathers.”

My Zondervan NIV Study Bible note on 21:3 says this: “Naboth’s refusal to dispose of his land was based on the conviction that the land was the Lord’s, that he had granted a perpetual lease to each Israelite family and that this lease was to be jealously preserved as the family’s permanent inheritance in the promised land.”

Very few Galilean contemporaries of Jesus would have lived directly on land quite that ancestral, but a culture valuing traditional ways and land over money and status was prevalent.

Clearly they didn’t have TV commercials enticing them to escape February weather for the blue waters of the Caribbean.