a village: a small rural settlement, smaller and less protected than a walled city
A village was the ordinary place most people in the biblical world actually lived: a cluster of homes in the countryside, without the wall, gate, and administration that marked a city. The New Testament often names the two together, cities and villages, to mean every kind of place a person might live, from the largest town to the smallest hamlet.
Because villages had no defenses and few resources, they were closely tied to the nearest city, and a town's outlying villages could be spoken of together as belonging to it. The word also serves simply to place a person: Bethlehem is called the village David came from, and Bethany the village of Mary and Martha. In every case it points to the same thing, a small settlement in the open country.
There is no hidden theology in the word itself. What matters for reading the Gospels is the picture it paints: Jesus and his followers move on foot from one small farming settlement to the next, teaching and healing among people far from the centers of power.