In 1 Nephi 11:13, Nephi, in a vision of the then-future mother of the Messiah, records the following:
And it came to pass that I looked and beheld the great city of Jerusalem, and also other cities. And I beheld the city of Nazareth; and in the city of Nazareth I beheld a virgin, and she was exceedingly fair and white.
It might strike some readers as being odd that Nazareth is referred to being a “city” in light of its very small size in comparison to ancient Jerusalem, let alone modern conceptions of the “city.” However, the term “city” in Hebrew, עִיר, in the words of HALOT, refers to any "permanent settlement without any reference to its size" such as Bethlehem (Ruth 3:15), so the use of “city” in the Book of Mormon for Nazareth is not problematic.
On the meaning of “city” (עִיר) in the Hebrew Bible, Timothy M Willis wrote the following:
An Israelite “city” (עִיר) served as a gathering-place for a particular group of people. The purposes for which they might have gathered could be military, economic, religious, or social. It was “a site ideologically apart from its environs.”
There probably were four types of cities in ancient Israel and Judah. Two types were present (in both the pre-monarchic and monarchic periods) within individual clans. One is a simple “city,” and the other “the city of the clan.” Some clans had several cities within their borders, some only one (e.g., Shechem, Tirzah). Even where there were several cities within a clan, it is likely that one city served as “the city of the clan.” The city in Zuph in which Saul finds Samuel (1 Samuel 9) might be one example of this. The city is not named, but there is a high place there, and the people gathered there for a sacrifice. Similarly, David’s clan met at a regional center (Bethlehem) for its ceremonial gatherings (1 Sam 20:6). The possibility that the inhabitants of several cities consider one city as their common city, so to speak, is also reflected in the reference to “the cities of Hebron” (2 Sam 2:3). A third type of city served as a gathering-place for a broader spectrum of the population, one that performed a common function for several clans or tribes. These were primarily religious centers (e.g., Shiloh, Bethel, Shechem, Gilgal, Beersheba, the Transjordanian shrine). The kinds added a couple of wrinkles to this picture. First, they apparently incorporated these higher supra-clan centers into their administrative structure. The kings also established new cities of another type, the administrative city, which controlled broader areas than the traditional clan centers. These included royal cities, fortified cities, and store-cities. At the top of these administrative cities was the national capital. Thus, the lines between these different types of settlements probably became blurred in many cases. (Timothy M. Willis, The Elders of the City: A Study of the Elders-Laws in Deuteronomy [Society of Biblical Literature Monograph Series 55; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2001], 14-15)
