Carpenter and builder

Houses in Israel were usually small, with rooms around a courtyard and flat roofs laid on wooden beams, and ordinary families often built them themselves. The carpenter made the timber framework, the roof beams, doors and windows. Large works — palaces, the temple, city walls — needed specialists, and carpenters worked side by side with masons and stonecutters (2 Kings 12:11–12). For David’s palace the craftsmen and the cedar came from Tyre, and timber for the second temple was again brought from Lebanon by sea to Joppa (Ezra 3:7). Isaiah lists a woodworker’s tools: a measuring line, a stylus, chisels and a compass (Isaiah 44:13).

In the Gospels Jesus is called “the carpenter” (Mark 6:3) and “the carpenter’s son” (Matthew 13:55). The Greek word tektōn means a builder or craftsman, usually in wood but also in stone. By one view Joseph and Jesus worked mostly with timber; by another they were builders more broadly, and some scholars suggest they found work in nearby Sepphoris, which Herod Antipas was rebuilding at the time. A tradition recorded by Justin Martyr in the 2nd century says Jesus made plows and yokes.