NAIM

NAIM. – Village of Galilee (in Lc. 7:11, Naïv), where Jesus raised the widow’s son. Although the distance of 12 miles from Thabor indicated by the Onomasticon (141, 5) is too great, and that shortened by St. Jerome to 2 miles is too small, there is no doubt that the same village is intended, called Nejm to the present day, situated at Endor (v.).

Since the Middle Ages, a church has been reported there which, by then reduced to ruins, was restored and rebuilt by the Franciscans in 1880. It stands to the east of the village. To the north, that is, at the entrance when coming from Nazareth, is the spring hewn out of the rock, beside three sarcophagi used as basins. To the northeast are rock-cut tombs. Since 1948 the village has been incorporated into the State of Israel, remaining almost uninhabited. The Franciscans conduct a pilgrimage there twice a year: on the Thursday of the fourth Sunday of Lent and on the fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost.

RESURRECTION OF THE SON OF THE WIDOW OF N. – G. Wilpert identified two representations of the miracle of N. in two cemetery frescoes in which the Lord touches a mummy lying on the ground with the virga Dei, and not in the aedicule as in the scenes of Lazarus, since according to the Gospel text (Lk. 7:11–15) the resurrection took place near the city of N. when the deceased young man was being carried to the tomb. Wilpert also records 17 sarcophagi, nine of them from Gaul; the deceased is already prepared for burial, that is, wrapped in bandages like a mummy, or simply lying on the ground, or placed in a sarcophagus. In seven sculptures the deceased’s mother is represented in a supplicating gesture (Wilpert, Sarcofagi, pls. 8, 4; 26, 23; 225, 2; 227, 1 and 5; fig. 93, p. 160). Typical is the sarcophagus in the Lateran Museum, no. 175, on which both the resurrection of Lazarus and that of the widow’s son are represented (id., Sarcofagi, pl. 228, 1). In the cemetery known as that of SS. Marco and Marcellano, G. Wilpert recognized the scene of the miracle scratched on the slab of a deceased woman named Firmana (id., ibid., p. 305, fig. 191).