The Country I Grew Up In

Words to Know

Occupied — when a foreign army and government run your country instead of your own.

Day laborer — someone hired one day at a time, with no promise of work tomorrow.

Debt — money owed. In my country, if you could not pay it, you lost your land.

My country was occupied.

That means another country ran it.

Here is how Rome got there, because nobody ever tells you. In 63 BC two brothers of our own royal family were fighting each other over the throne, and both of them asked a Roman general named Pompey to come and settle it. He came. He picked one brother, laid siege to Jerusalem, and walked into the Temple. Rome never left.

That is the year it started. A family argument, and an invitation.

Judea and Galilee were run differently, and I lived in Galilee.

Judea, in the south, where Jerusalem is, was run by Rome directly from AD 6 onward. A Roman officer called a prefect governed it. Roman troops were stationed there. Rome assessed and collected the taxes, and Roman courts had the last word. When I was a grown man, that prefect was Pontius Pilate.

Galilee, in the north, where I grew up, had no Roman governor and no Roman garrison. It had a client ruler: Herod Antipas, a son of Herod the Great. Rome let him keep his throne for forty-three years, from 4 BC to AD 39, on one condition. Keep the place quiet and keep the money coming. ¹

So in my village you might not see a Roman soldier from one year to the next. You saw Antipas’s men. Do not let that comfort you. A client ruler is a cheaper way to hold a country, not a gentler one.

Go deeperWhy a client ruler squeezed harder

A client ruler knows the roads, the families and the harvest, which a foreigner does not. And he keeps his palace only as long as Rome is satisfied — which gives him a reason to squeeze that a foreigner does not have either.

Foreign rule had lasted six hundred years.

Count from 586 BC, the year Babylon burned Jerusalem, to the year I was born. That is about six hundred years.

In all those six hundred years, my people governed themselves for about eighty — one stretch, won by a revolt, which you will meet in Lesson 4. Eighty years out of six hundred. Then Pompey.

That is the number to carry through this book. Not six hundred years of nothing. Six hundred years with one gap in it that people still told stories about.

My village was tiny.

I grew up in Nazareth, a village of a few hundred people. It is not mentioned once in the Hebrew scriptures, and it is not in any writing at all before the gospels.

When one man in your Bible hears where I am from, he says: can anything good come out of Nazareth? (John 1:46). That is not an insult. That is a geography question. It was nowhere.

Go deeperNazareth missing from Josephus's list of towns

A Jewish historian named Josephus commanded troops in Galilee in the war against Rome in AD 66 and names dozens of Galilean towns and villages in his books. Nazareth is not one of them.

We worked with our hands.

My father built things. Your Bible calls him a carpenter. The Greek word is tektōn, and it means a builder — a man who works with stone and timber and goes wherever the job is (Mark 6:3; Matthew 13:55).

We were not the poorest people around. We ate in a normal year. In a bad year we did not. That describes almost everybody I knew.

Now the thing that explains everything else I said: my people were losing their land.

Families were losing their land. It worked like this. Money was taken out of the same field from three directions at once. Antipas taxed the land in Galilee and took a cut of every load that passed his toll stations. Rome taxed Antipas, and Antipas taxed us. The Temple claimed a half shekel a year from every grown man, about two days’ pay for a laborer, plus a tenth of the produce and the first of the harvest. ²

Now let me be honest about the one thing I cannot give you. No tax bill from a Galilean village survives. Anybody who tells you the exact percentage is guessing.

Go deeperThree claims on one field, in detail

What is documented, though, is where the money actually moved. Antipas's toll men sat not only on the trade roads but at the harbors on the lake, and one of my own followers was sitting in a toll booth at Capernaum when I met him (Mark 2:14).

In Judea, Rome collected directly rather than through a client ruler: a tax on the land and a tax per head, worked out from a register of names. That register is why a census turns up in the story of my birth. And beyond the half shekel and the tenth, the Temple also claimed the animals for its offerings.

And here is the detail that broke people. The land tax was figured on the land, not on the harvest. So a bad year did not lower the bill.

Then you borrowed, and not from a bank.

There were none. You borrowed from whoever had money, which meant the people at the top: the large landowners, the officials around Antipas, and the wealthy priestly families in Jerusalem. The loan was written down, with witnesses, and your land was the security.

Those papers mattered. In AD 66, when Jerusalem rose against Rome, one of the first things the rebels did was burn the building that held the public records, in order to destroy the moneylenders’ bonds (Josephus, War 2.427). ³ Nobody burns an archive over nothing.

Now you should be asking me a hard question.

In Lesson 4 you are going to read my people’s own law. It bans charging interest to a poor man (Exodus 22:25). It cancels all debts every seven years (Deuteronomy 15:1–2). So how did anybody end up permanently in debt?

Three ways. First, those laws named nobody to enforce them: no court, no officer, no penalty. They are addressed to your conscience. A written loan contract was enforced in the ruler’s court, by the ruler’s men. Two systems, and only one of them had a bailiff. Second, the paper was written to get around the interest ban: a man borrows the value of eight measures of grain and signs for ten, and there is no interest anywhere on that document. ⁴ Third, our own teachers built a way around the seven-year cancellation, the prosbul, remembered as the work of Hillel around the time I was born. It handed the debt over to a court before the seventh year, so the cancellation did not reach it. ⁵ The law itself saw this coming: Deuteronomy 15:9 warns a lender not to refuse his needy neighbor because the year of release is close.

So the protections were ancient, holy, and toothless. The contracts were ordinary, recent, and enforceable. That is how.

This is what losing the land looked like.

Then a second bad year came. You defaulted. The creditor took the paper to the court that handled debts. The paper said the land stood as security, so the land became his. Nobody had to steal anything. Every step was in order, and all of it was legal.

Then he made you an offer, because he needed somebody to work the field and you were already standing on it. You stayed on your grandfather’s ground as a tenant and handed over a share of every harvest. Or your sons walked out and looked for wages.

And if a balance was still owed, a man who could not pay could be jailed until somebody paid for him, or sold with his family. That is in one of my own stories, where the master ordered him to be sold, together with his wife and children (Matthew 18:25).

Go deeperDebt slavery elsewhere in the Bible

That story does not end with the sale. The master later threw him into prison until he should pay the debt (Matthew 18:30). And debt slavery was not a new idea by my time: your Bible already tells of a widow whose creditor is coming to take her two children (2 Kings 4:1), and of families mortgaging their fields and selling their children to buy food (Nehemiah 5:1-5).

That is why men stood in the square at dawn.

Every morning, in every town, day laborers waited to be hired for the day. They were not lazy. Many of them were the sons of families who had owned land within living memory.

I told a story about men like that (Matthew 20:1–16). A landowner hires some at dawn, some at noon, and some at five in the afternoon. He asks the last group why they have been standing there all day.

Their answer is one line: because nobody hired us.

Every person listening to me had stood in that square. They knew exactly what that day felt like: a whole day gone, nothing earned, and children at home.

And there was a city over the hill.

Four miles from my village, Herod Antipas was building his capital out of stone. Its name was Sepphoris. The men of Nazareth walked over and worked on it. My father almost certainly did, and so did I.

I say almost certainly because no book records it. But a tektōn goes where the building is, and the largest building site in Galilee was an hour’s walk from my door for years.

Here is what makes that strange.

About the time I was born, Rome burned Sepphoris to the ground. Herod the Great died in 4 BC, and the country rose. At Sepphoris a man named Judas broke into the royal armory and armed his followers. Varus, the Roman governor of Syria, came down with two legions, and his officer Gaius took Sepphoris, burned it, and sold its people into slavery (Josephus, Antiquities 17.271, 17.289).

Then Antipas — the dead king’s son, installed with Rome’s approval — rebuilt that same city as his capital and hired the neighbors of the people who had been sold. ⁶

So when I told stories, I was not making things up.

Your church teaches my stories as gentle little pictures about the soul.

Look at what is actually in them, and go read each one. A landlord who lives far away and sends men to collect (Mark 12:1–9). A manager about to be fired, cooking the books on his way out (Luke 16:1–8). A servant thrown in prison over a debt (Matthew 18:23–35). A widow who cannot get a judge to listen (Luke 18:1–8). Workers. Wages. Rent.

You could hear these as pretty pictures about the soul. Some preachers do. But that is not where they started.

I was not reaching for pretty images.

I was describing the news.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Matthew 20:1–16, the story of the workers in the square.

You will find: men standing all day because nobody hired them — and a landowner who pays the late ones a full day’s wage anyway.

Ask yourself: who in that story is angry, and why?

The Short Version

• Rome arrived in 63 BC, invited in by two royal brothers fighting over the throne.
• Counted from 586 BC, my people had six hundred years of foreign rule with one gap of about eighty.
• Judea had a Roman prefect. Galilee, where I lived, had a client ruler, Herod Antipas.
• Three claims on one field drove families into debt, and the laws that should have saved their land had no enforcer.
• My stories are full of rent, debt, and day labor because that was the world outside my door.

Think About It

1. Is there a place in your town where people wait to be picked up for work?
2. Why might a church prefer to teach my stories as pictures about the soul?