Jesus' Seventh Year – Jesus has an Accidental Fall 

Jesus’ seventh year (1 CE) proved an eventful year in his life. It began with a snowstorm! Galilee had two feet deep of snow, one of the largest snowfalls at Nazareth in a hundred years.

Jesus enjoyed playing with friends. Inside, they would play with the ‘toy’ remnants in his family’s carpenter shop and outside, he and other boys played rough and aggressively, receiving the normal number of cuts and bruises. Jesus did suffer a more serious accident when he fell down the stairs coming down from the roof during a sandstorm.

A baby brother, Joseph, the fourth member of the Nazareth family, was born Wednesday morning, March 16. Jesus turned seven on August 21, which was the age kids started school. For three years, he attended elementary school at the Nazareth synagogue. They spoke Hebrew at the school, which Jesus needed to learn. They had no textbooks and studied only the scriptures.

He received the majority of his moral and spiritual education at home. But it was through speaking with people from all over the world who came into his father's repair shop that Jesus learned about people and practical solutions to life's problems. On the Sabbath, Jesus took walks with his father where they talked about many things and grew closer.

Jewish children had no organized games. The big events were weddings and funerals, which were spectacular affairs where children would dance and sing. Otherwise, they emulated their parents by doing more serious things.

Jesus enjoyed playing with scrap wood pieces in the home’s carpenter shop, often with the neighbor boy and later his brother James. Jesus could never figure out why fun activities were forbidden on the Sabbath, but obeyed his parents. He enjoyed humor and play activities, which had to be suppressed. Nonetheless, Jesus was usually cheerful and fun-loving.

Jesus fell down the stone stairs, leading to the canvas-roofed bedroom, during an unexpected sandstorm that struck several months after the anticipated rainy season in March and April. He had been playing on the housetop and, blinded by the blowing sand, accidentally fell down the stairs. Upon Joseph's return from work in Endor, he promptly added handrails on both sides of the staircase. This minor incident deeply worried Mary, prompting her to become overly protective of Jesus and keeping him within her sight for months.

Since boys play rough, Jesus received his quota of cuts and bruises. If you envisage the average childhood and youth of an aggressive boy, you will have a fairly good idea of the youthful career of Jesus, and you will be able to imagine how much anxiety he caused Mary.

Jesus began his formal education at seven, the normal age to begin school for Jewish children. Jesus just turned of age in August when he began school. Jesus was a fluent reader, writer, and speaker of two languages, Aramaic and Greek. However, every class in the Nazareth synagogue was taught in Hebrew, so Jesus needed to learn another language. Jesus was eager to go to school.

Jesus studied the Book of the Law for three years, followed by the study of the Prophets and the Psalms. Nothing was studied but scripture and school lasted the entire year, but with greatly shortened hours during summer. Everything had to be memorized. The teacher, called the chazan, faced them sitting in a semicircle, and uttered a statement which the students repeated. Having no textbooks, the students learned by reading aloud and constant repetition.

Jesus learned about people from all over the world from those who passed through his father’s repair shop and from speaking to those in the caravans as they rested near the city’s spring. Being fluent in Greek, he could converse with most travelers. This was Jesus’ real education. He achieved the ability to grapple with the difficult problems of life from his close association with others, young and old, Jew and gentile.

Jesus’ moral and spiritual culture he learned at home, and his intellectual and theological education he learned from school. But understanding people and devotedly loving them he learned by associating with them. In this sense, Jesus was highly educated.

Joseph would take Jesus out for walks on the Sabbath. Often they would climb a high hill near their home and enjoy a panoramic view of all Galilee. They also strolled through the countryside, observing nature change with each passing season. Jesus loved the outdoors, and some of his earliest training had to do with a reverent and sympathetic contact with nature

All the mothers and young women of Nazareth knew Jesus since he would hang out at the spring, a social center for the entire town. Jesus learned to milk the family cow and care for animals this year. In this and the following year, he learned to weave and make cheese. He was an expert loom operator by age ten.

About this time, Jesus and the neighbor boy Jacob became great friends of the potter, Nathan, who worked near the flowing spring. As they watched his deft fingers mold the clay on the potter's wheel, they often decided to be potters themselves when they grew up. Nathan loved the boys and often gave them clay to play with, encouraging them to compete in modeling objects and animals.