Nazareth Village

“A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit.” Isaiah 11:1 (NIV)

Nazareth Village is a recreation of a 1st century town, made to look the way Nazareth would have during Jesus’s time. We went there early Wednesday morning and took a tour of the small village.

According to our guide, the name Nazareth comes from a word meaning “new shoot.” In Isaiah 11:1, the prophet Isaiah refers to Christ as a shoot coming up from the stump of Jesse. How fitting that Jesus would be from a village whose name meant “new shoot.”

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Here you can see the new shoot from the olive tree coming up out of the stump.

In the village were people in first century dress, doing things that people would have done back in the time of Jesus. We met a shepherd tending sheep, just getting ready to be sheared. We saw women picking grapes from the vineyards, a carpenter hard at work, and a seamstress making clothing from the sheep’s wool.

When it’s time for shearing, they separate the sheep from the goats. The shepherd here does not have any goats, for goats do not listen and tend to go their own way, but the sheep listen to their shepherd, and only their shepherd.
The vineyard here was planted on the ruins of an actual vineyard and wine press that were found in this location.
Carpenters were actually skilled masons as well as wood workers and would have made stone tools as well as wooden ones. It’s believed that Jesus knew how to work with both stone and wood.

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The woman here is turning the wool into beautiful colored yarn to make clothing and blankets for her family.
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In the bowl in the middle you can see some of the ingredients used to make dye for the yarn. Onion and pomegranate are more common, but the rarest and most expensive yarn color was purple. The color came from the mucus of Murex Snails from the Mediterranean Sea (that means all those rich people were walking around covered in snail mucus, ew).
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An olive hanging in an olive tree. They didn’t eat the olives, but used them to make oil.

As you can see, the houses are mostly made from stone which was abundant in the area, thanks to all the surrounding mountains. Only the roofs were made of wood. When the friends of the paralyzed man lowered him through a roof to meet Jesus, they probably would have cut through a roof like this one.
This is what tombs looked like in the first century. They were carved out of rock, with a small entrance and a stone to cover it. Inside are little niches where they put the bodies.
“He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written:

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him. He began by saying to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”

It was the custom that when you read the scriptures you stood up, but when you taught, you sat down. This is why Jesus sat down after he was done reading, and all the eyes were fixed upon him, because he was about to teach them.

It was after this that the people tried to seize Jesus and throw him off a nearby cliff, because they believed that he was blaspheming. Jesus of course escaped them and disappeared, and it isn’t mentioned in scripture if he ever returned to Nazareth after this happened. Since he wasn’t accepted in his hometown, we know that most of his ministry took place elsewhere, where he might find willing hearts.

May our hearts always be willing and filled with the love of Christ.

Thank you for reading.

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