Next up was the ruins of the town of Chorazin. There are different spellings, but this was the spelling in my bible. This site was particularly neat because we were allowed to roam around in the excavated ruins, and there was almost no one else there. It really gave a sense of what a town was like at the 1st Century time. The houses were all different sizes, with one like a mansion for a huge extended family. Different rooms for different groups of families, but a shared courtyard, and multiple doors along the outside to the “street”. At it’s prime, there were likely about 1000 people living there. The Biblical connection? Read Matthew 11:21 and you will see it right there. There’s another connection too, keep reading and I’ll show you with the pictures.
The map helps see how the city is laid out.
The Moses seat described here is in the synagogue, but it is a replica. The real one they found is in the museum we will visit later. I read the reading for this devotion, from Matthew 23: 1-12, from the replica seat.
Here’s one of Pastor on the Moses seat. And here is one of the other corner of the synagogue area.
Another reading was the parable of the lost coin, which was really brought to life by seeing what the houses were like. Without larger windows and a dark roof on top, it would have been very difficult to find a coin dropped inside one of the dwellings.
The olive oil press was interesting. It made it come to life how they produced this valuable commodity.
And the olive oil would run down and be collected from this hole.
This was probably my favorite part of Chorazin…the ritual bath. It had a cover to keep the water clean, and was used to become ceremonially clean when needed. There were steps leading in from the other side, very neat.
Next we drove by Bethsaida, even though there was nothing really there to see, but just to understand the proximity to everything else. We also got our first glimpse of the north end of the Jordan river.
We’ll see more of that tomorrow, further downstream.
OK, next up is the boat ride on the Sea of Galilee!