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town or village
Cana
- Today Horbat Qana
- Location disputed
Questions
History
Cana of Galilee was a village in the hills of Lower Galilee, and its site is disputed. Two places have the strongest claims. Khirbet Qana is a ruined hill on the northern edge of the Beit Netofa Valley, about 13 km north of Nazareth. Kafr Kanna is a town about 7 km north-east of Nazareth on the road to Tiberias, where the churches of the wedding stand today. A third claimant, Qana in southern Lebanon, follows an early tradition that placed Cana near Sidon.
Both sites have been excavated. At Khirbet Qana, Douglas Edwards and C. Thomas McCollough uncovered a Jewish village that grew from the Hellenistic period into the Byzantine, with ritual baths and a public building that may have been a synagogue. At Karm er-Ras, on the western edge of Kafr Kanna, Yardenna Alexandre excavated from 1999 to 2011 a Jewish village of the early Roman period that later declined.
Cana is named only in the Gospel of John. At a marriage there, where the mother of Jesus was and to which Jesus and his disciples were called, he turned water into wine, and John calls it the beginning of his miracles. When he came to Cana again, a nobleman whose son lay sick at Capernaum begged him to come down; Jesus told him that his son lived, and the boy recovered at that hour. Nathanael, one of the disciples, was of Cana.
In the war of AD 66-67 Josephus, then commanding in Galilee, lodged in a village of Galilee named Cana and from there marched all night to Tiberias. Christian writers disagreed about where Cana was. Eusebius, in the early fourth century, identified it with the Kanah of Joshua in the lot of Asher near Sidon. In 386 Paula and Eustochium wrote from Bethlehem that from Nazareth Cana could be seen not far off, and Jerome tells that Paula passed through Cana on her journey through Galilee. At Khirbet Qana the excavators found a cave complex later adapted for Christian veneration; which site the pilgrims of late antiquity saw remains a matter of debate.
Scripture: John 2:1–11; John 4:46–54; John 21:2
Sources
- Josephus, Life 86-90 (his quarters at Cana and night march to Tiberias)
- Eusebius, Onomasticon, s.v. Kana (Josh 19:28) (C. U. Wolf's translation, no. 602)
- Paula and Eustochium to Marcella, in Jerome, Letter 46.13 (386); Jerome, Letter 108.13
- P. Richardson, 'Khirbet Qana (and Other Villages) as a Context for Jesus', in Building Jewish in the Roman East (2004)
- D. R. Edwards, 'Walking the Roman Landscape in Lower Galilee: Sepphoris, Jotapata, and Khirbet Qana', in A Wandering Galilean: Essays in Honour of Sean Freyne (2009)
- C. T. McCollough, 'The Synagogue at Khirbet Qana in Its Village Context', in The Synagogue in Ancient Palestine (2020)
- Y. Alexandre, Cana of Galilee: Excavations at Karm er-Ras 1999-2011 (Israel Antiquities Authority, 2025)
Checked against its sources; not yet read by a historian.
Verses (4)
- John 2:1
- And the third day there was a marriage in Cana of Galilee; and the mother of Jesus was there:
- John 2:11
- This beginning of miracles did Jesus in Cana of Galilee, and manifested forth his glory; and his disciples believed on him.
- John 4:46
- So Jesus came again into Cana of Galilee, where he made the water wine. And there was a certain nobleman, whose son was sick at Capernaum.
- John 21:2
- There were together Simon Peter, and Thomas called Didymus, and Nathanael of Cana in Galilee, and the sons of Zebedee, and two other of his disciples.
King James Version