Its initial splendor had been snuffed out by Babylonia in 586 B.C. Asked to imagine the boy's main impression, Roni Reich, director of Temple Mount excavations for the Israeli Antiquities Authority, says, "Big!" To his right would have been Jerusalem's Upper City, its Gold Coast, where the families of the priests who tended the sacrificial altars lived according to Jewish law but in Roman splendor. high-a wall not of the Temple itself but of a gargantuan platform atop which it perched. The view to Jesus' left would have been taken up by a wall up to 150 ft. The sounds of construction would have mixed with the bleats and bellows of sacrificial animals for sale in streetside shops. Jerusalem, like today's Chicago, New York City or London, was a huge, ongoing building project. The pilgrims would have shared the road with ox teams hauling huge slabs of limestone. During Passover, Succoth and Shavuoth, the great festivals during which Jews were obligated to make sacrifices at the Temple, between 100,000 and 250,000 visitors (historians differ) would stream down the long city thoroughfare. Jerusalem was one of the biggest cities between Alexandria and Damascus, with a permanent population of some 80,000. But his native Galilee certainly had nothing to compare with this. Excavations of the city of Sepphoris, near Nazareth, reveal a bustling town, suggesting that he may have been less of a country lad than previous scholarship posited. There is a debate regarding exactly how citified the young Jesus would have been. A stretch of that road is visible today, just below the Western Wall, majestically wide but piled high on one side with huge blocks of stone that rained from above during one of the city's many destructions. Though he had been there before-Luke says his family was visiting "as usual" for Passover-the 12-year-old from Nazareth, 60 miles to the north, must still have been agog walking south down the grand new Roman street toward the Temple's lower entrance. It is interesting to see that the growth rate of the Jewish population in Jerusalem has been lower than that of the Jewish population in Israel for the past decade (except for one year), despite the large ultra-Orthodox population in the city, which is characterized by a high rate of natural increase.It is the Gospel of Luke that describes Jesus' childhood visit to Jerusalem. Among the Arab population, almost all of the increase is due to natural growth. The main sources of population growth in Jerusalem are natural growth (births less deaths), which in 2019 added 21,400 persons, a negative migration balance, subtracting 8,400 persons, and an international migration balance (mostly Aliya), which added about 3,500 persons to the city’s population. If this happens, we will see the current balance between Jews and Arabs in the city’s population, which currently stands at 62% Jews and 38% Arabs, stabilize. If these trends continue, around 2023, the growth rates of both populations in the city may equal. However, we see that over the last decade, the growth rate of Jews is on the rise, and it was 1% in 2009, while the growth rate of the Arab population is on the decline, and in 2009 it stood at 2.9%. The growth rate of the Arab population (which stood at 2.0% in 2019) is higher than that of the Jewish population (1.7%). While the population growth rate in Jerusalem is the same as that of the Israeli population, the various populations within the city are growing at different rates. This percentage remaining constant, means that the growth percentage of Jerusalem’s population is the same as that of the State of Israel as a whole. For many years (from as early as 1967), Jerusalem is home to about 10% of Israeli residents. Jerusalem is by far the largest city in Israel in terms of its population, which at the end of 2019 numbered 936,000.
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