Jesus and his band crossed the valley and approached the entrance of this city. Then, the account tells us, “as he got near the gate of the city, why, look! there was a dead man being carried out, the only-begotten son of his mother. Besides, she was a widow. A considerable crowd from the city was also with her.

Luke 7:12, 13.

Regarding this encounter, Arthur P. Stanley, who visited this location during the last century, wrote in his book Sinai and Palestine: “On the northern slope . . . is the ruined village of Nain. . . . One entrance alone it could have had, that which opens on the rough hill side in its downward slope to the plain. It must have been in this steep descent, as, according to Eastern custom, they ‘carried out the dead man,’ that ‘nigh to the gate’ of the village the bier was stopped. . . . It is a spot which has no peculiarity of feature to fix it on the memory; but, in the authenticity of its claims, and the narrow compass within which we have to look for the touching incident, it may rank amongst the most interesting points of the scenery of the Gospel narrative.”

Another 19th-century visitor to this place, J. W. McGarvey, wrote in his book Lands of the Bible: “Nain is perched on a bench, with a steep slope of about 60 feet descending to the plain just north of it. The road from the north approaches it by a narrow valley at its western end, and beyond this are some rock-cut sepulchres . . . As Jesus approached the gate of the town, coming from the direction of Capernaum, where he was the previous day, the procession bearing the son of the widow was going out toward this burying-place, and thus they happened to meet.”