Sepphoris sits on a low limestone hill four miles north of Nazareth, commanding the road from the Mediterranean coast to the Sea of Galilee. The Greek name Sepphoris and the Hebrew Tzippori both echo the word for "bird" — Josephus calls the city "the ornament of all Galilee." Herod Antipas rebuilt it as his Galilean capital in the early first century AD, and the construction work would have been ongoing through the years of Jesus's youth in nearby Nazareth. Leroy Waterman directed the first scientific excavations for the University of Michigan in 1931; James Strange of the University of South Florida has worked the site continuously since 1983; Ehud Netzer and Ze'ev Weiss directed the major Hebrew University expedition from 1985 through 2000. The excavated remains span six centuries. A Roman-period theater carved into the northern slope seats roughly 4,500. A grid of Hellenistic-Roman streets crosses the western summit, lined with a basilica, market buildings, and a Byzantine-era mosaic-floored basilica complex. More than thirty Jewish ritual baths (mikva'ot) have been identified — a density that establishes Sepphoris as a thoroughly observant Jewish city through the first century AD, despite its Greco-Roman civic architecture. The most-photographed find is the third-century AD floor mosaic in the so-called Dionysos House: a young woman's face, framed in pale tesserae and known since its 1987 discovery as the Mona Lisa of the Galilee. The synagogue mosaic on the lower city, with its zodiac wheel and binding-of-Isaac panel, dates to the fifth century AD. A long-standing Christian tradition — first attested in the apocryphal Protevangelium of James in the second century AD — locates the home of Mary's parents Joachim and Anne at Sepphoris; a Crusader church on the summit preserves the memory. The dig continues; the finds are at Sepphoris National Park and the Israel Museum. Sources: Eric Meyers, Ehud Netzer, and Carol Meyers, Sepphoris (Eisenbrauns, 1992); Ze'ev Weiss, The Sepphoris Synagogue (Israel Exploration Society, 2005); James Strange, "Sepphoris" in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East (Oxford, 1997); Josephus, Antiquities 18.27.
Sepphoris matters for biblical study chiefly because its proximity to Nazareth places a major Herodian construction project within walking distance of Jesus's boyhood home, while its abundant ritual baths confirm that a densely Jewish population inhabited a city of conspicuously Greco-Roman civic form throughout the first century AD.