p. 89 | The Sabbath School

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Feb 24, 1881

The Sabbath School.

NAZARETH AS IT IS AND WAS.

NAZARETH lies among the hills, which extend for about six miles between the plains of El Bat-tauf on the north, and Esdraelon on the south. It is on the north side of the latter, and overlooks one of the numerous little folds or bays of the great plain, which are seen wherever the hills are open. The village lies on the northern side of this green bay, and is reached by a narrow, steep, and rough mountain path, over which the vil-lagers have to bring their harvests laboriously from the plain beneath, on camels, mules, and donkeys. If the traveler ride up this path in March, when Palestine is at its best, he will be charmed by the bright green of the plains and the beauty of the flowers, every where lighting up the otherwise barren hills, which, at best, yield scanty pasture for sheep and goats. The red anemone and the pink phlox are the commonest; rock roses, white and yellow, are plentiful, with a few pink ones; the cytisus here and there covers the ground with golden flowers, and the pink convolvulus, marigold, wild geranium and red tulip, are varied by several kinds of orchis. As the path ascends, the little fertile valley beneath, running east and west, gradually opens to about a quarter of a mile in breadth, covered with fields and gar-dens, divided by cactus hedges, and running into the hills for about a mile. Near the village, be-side the pathway, about an hour from Esdraelon, is a spring, from which the water pours from several taps in a slab of masonry, falling into a trough below, for camels, horses, asses, and cattle.

The distant view of the village itself, in spring, is beautiful. Its streets rise in terraces on the hill-slopes, towards the north-west. The hills, here and there broken into perpendicular faces, rise above it in an amphitheatre round, to a height of about five hundred feet, and shut it in from the bleak winds of winter. The flat-roofed houses, built of the yellowish-white limestone of the neighborhood, shine in the sun with a dazzling brightness, from among gardens, and fig-trees, olives, cypresses, and the white and scarlet blos-soms of the orange and pomegranate. A mosque with its graceful minaret, a large convent, from whose gardens rise tall cypresses, and a modest church, are the principal buildings.

The streets are narrow, poor, and dirty, and the shops are mere recesses on each side of them, but the narrowness shuts out the heat of the sun, and the miniature shops are large enough for the local trade. Numbers of dogs which belong to the place, and have no owner, lie about, as in all Eastern towns. Small gardens, rich in green clumps of olive-trees and stately palms, break the monotonous yellow of the rocks and houses, while doves coo, and birds of many kinds twitter, in the branches, or flit across the open. The bright colors of the roller, the hoopoe, the sunbird, or the bulbul, catch the eye as one or other darts swiftly past, and many birds familiar in England are seen or heard, if the traveler's stay be lengthened, for of the 322 birds found in Palestine, 172 are also British. The song of the lark floods a thou-sand acres of sky with melody; the restless tit-mouse, the willow-wren, the blackcap, the hedge-sparrow, the whitethroat, or the nightingale, flit or warble on the hill-side, or in the cactus hedges, while the rich notes of the song-thrush or black-bird rise from the green clumps in the valley be-neath.

The wagtail runs over the pebbles of the brook as here at home; the common sparrow haunts the streets and house-tops; swallows and swifts skim the hill-sides and the grassy meadows; and, in winter, the robin-redbreast abounds. Great butterflies flit over the hill-sides, amongst the flowers, while flocks of sheep and goats dot the slopes and the little plain below. Through this a brook ripples, the only one in the valley, and thither the women and maidens go to fetch water in tall jars, for household use. It is the one spring of the town, and, hence, must have been that which the mothers and daughters of Christ's day frequented. It rises under the choir of the present Greek church, and is led down the hill-side in a covered channel. An open space near the church is the threshing-floor of the village, where, after harvest, the yoked oxen draw the threshing-sledges slowly, round and round, over the grain, in the open air. No wonder that in spring Nazareth should have been thought a par-adise, or that it should be spoken of as perhaps the only spot in Palestine where the mind feels relief from the unequaled desolation that reigns nearly everywhere else.

Later in the year, the hills around lose the charm of their spring flowers. They are then gray and barren, divided by dry gullies, with no color to relieve their tame and commonplace out-lines, the same on every side.

Nazareth lies nearly twelve hundred feet above the sea, and some of the hills which cluster round, and shut it in, rise about five hundred feet higher. It is a mountain village, only to be reached from the plain by a tedious climb.

The free air of their mountain home seems to have had its effect on the people of Nazareth. Its bright-eyed, happy children and comely women strike the traveler, and even their dress differs from that of other parts. Through Palestine generally, the frequent and excessive changes of climate expose the peasants, or fellahin, to rheu-matism, coughs, and bronchitis; and, as a protec-tion, the men in many parts wear a sheepskin coat, on warm days as well as cold. The women, however, make no change in their dress, which usually consists of nothing but a long blue gar-ment tied in round the waist, a bonnet of red cloth, decorated with an edging or roll of silver coins, bordering the forehead and extending to the ears, reminding one of the crescent-shaped female head-dress worn by some of the Egyptian priestesses. Over this, a veil or shawl of coarse white cotton is thrown, which hangs down to the waist, serving to cover the mouth, while the bosom is left exposed, for Eastern and Western ideas of decorum differ in some things.

The various customs which seem peculiar to Nazareth are not less striking [than those of the plain of Esdraelon]. The short abba or cloak of the men, and their gorgeous kefeyehs, or ker-chiefs, folded triangularly, and thrown over the head, so as to fall over the neck and shoulders; the white veil, the silk dresses, the broad scarfs, and many colored trousers, red, green, blue, and yellow, of the women, give a crowd a peculiarly picturesque appearance, and differ materially from the sordid dresses of the poorer southern villages. In a country where nothing changes, through age after age, the dress of to-day is very likely, in most respects, the same as it was two thousand years ago, though the prevailing color of the Hebrew dress, at least in the better classes, was the natural white of the materials employed, which the fuller made even whiter.

One characteristic of the hills round Nazareth existing already in Christ's day, and, indeed, much earlier, is a striking proof of the denseness of the population of Palestine in former times, and of its restless industry and energy. Many of them are honeycombed with countless excava-tions of various kinds. Cemeteries of over two hundred tombs, cut in the soft rock, some of them large tunneled vaults, with separate hollows for twelve bodies; large numbers of cisterns, grape and olive presses, store or dwelling caves, wells and quarries, are everywhere abundant, as, in-deed, they are over the whole country, but es-pecially in the Shephelah or Philistine plain. The cisterns are from twenty to thirty feet deep, shaped like a church bell or inverted funnel, about two and a half feet across at the mouth, and fif-teen to twenty-five at the bottom, the whole cut out of the solid limestone, showing that Palestine must always have been, for a good part of the year, a waterless country, needing to store up the rains of autumn and spring. It is not un-common to find groups of from three to ten, or even more, of these fine excavations together. What must have been the density of the popula-tion, what its civilization and industry, to leave such remains in such numbers!

The Nazareth hills are, for the most part, neg-lected now, but were utilized in Christ's day as the hill-sides along the Rhine or the lime-slopes of Malta are at present, by terrace cultivation. Traces of these ancient terraces may still be seen. All the loose stones were gathered and built into rough walls along the sides of the hills, like so many steps, as at Bethlehem still. The tops of the strips thus gained, after being leveled, pro-duced grapes and all kinds of fruit in great abundance. The supporting walls, having been long neglected, have fallen down, and well-nigh disappeared; the earth once behind them has been washed away by the heavy rains, and the slopes, except in spring, when the flowers are in their glory, show little but barren rock.—Geikie's Life of Christ, pp. 110-114.