August
11
/ 2021
Nazareth was inhabited since the Bronze Age, and pottery dating from 900-600 BC confirms an Iron Age settlement there, but the Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian invasions turned the region into a wasteland. Villages were destroyed and the people exiled. For almost 600 years, lasting from the eighth to the second century BC, the region was depopulated. By 330 BC, during the Hellenistic period, they gradually returned and by the second century BC to the first century AD, Nazareth had grown into a hamlet. The name ‘Nazareth’ can be derived from the Hebrew word for 'branch', and may allude to the Messianic prophesy in Book of Isaiah 11:1 “ A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his
