And it is this sixth-century basilica, the Church of the Nativity, that has stood throughout the ages, although it has experienced extended periods of disrepair, especially under Ottoman control in the mid-nineteenth century. Despite extensive earthquake damage to the buildings, feuding between the Crusaders and the Greek Orthodox Church over control of the basilica, and even the theft of the silver star covering the grotto, the Church of the Nativity still stands as a symbol commemorating Jesus’s birth.
OLD TESTAMENT BETHLEḤEM
Many readers may not be aware that Bethleḥem (Heb. Beit Leḥem, ) has a long checkered history prior to the birth of Jesus. The name Beit Leḥem in Hebrew means “house of bread,” which is due to its reputation as fertile agricultural land.6 When I lived in California, I used to refer to Bethleḥem as “the Fresno of ancient Israel,” as my hometown is known worldwide for its agricultural productivity, especially California raisins. Now, as a proud Hawkeye, I have altered my analogy of Bethleḥem to “the Iowa of ancient Israel.”
It was this agricultural village just to the south of Jerusalem that became famous for its affiliation with Jesus of Nazareth. But how did a town south of Jerusalem come to be associated with the birth of a man from Galilee far to the north? Scholars argue that Bethleḥem was highlighted in the Gospels as the birthplace of Jesus because of its history, especially its association with the kings of ancient Israel and Judah. So before we look at the texts narrating the birth of Jesus, let’s look at a few references to Bethleḥem from the Hebrew Bible that contributed to the expectation of a Davidic messiah coming forth from Bethleḥem.
RUTH
The story of Ruth introduces the city of Bethleḥem’s role in the creation of the Israelite monarchy. ’Elimelek, his wife Na‘omi, and their sons Maḥlon and Kilyon, a family from Bethleḥem, were on their way to the country of Mo’ab. In Mo’ab ’Elimelek died, and the two sons married Ruth and ‘Orpah. Upon the deaths of the sons, their mother Na‘omi decided to return to Bethleḥem, and Ruth chose to join her.
Back in Bethleḥem, while gleaning grain Ruth learns that the man in whose field she had been working, Bo‘az, is actually a relative of her dead husband, making him eligible to marry and “redeem” her according to Jewish levirate marriage laws, which instruct a brother or the next of kin to produce a child with a dead relative’s widow in order to provide protection for the widow and a legacy for her dead husband.7 And after a nearly disastrous encounter with a more closely related next of kin, the humorously nameless peloni almoni (literally “Mr. So-and-So” in English), Bo‘az legally acquires Ruth, and they live happily ever after.
The role of Bethleḥem as a birthplace of the house of Israel comes full circle in the story of Ruth when the people pronounce a blessing upon Ruth:
“May the LORD make the woman who is coming into your house like Rachel and Leah, who together built up the house of Israel. May you produce children in Ephrathah and bestow a name [i.e., become famous] in Bethlehem.” (4:11)
Furthermore, the child born to Ruth and Bo‘az was named ‘Obed, who was the father of Yishai (Jesse; 4:17), who was, of course, the father of King David (4:18–22). Thus, because Bethleḥem was known as David’s hometown and the place where the prophet Shmu’el (Samuel) anointed him king (see 1 Sam. 16:1–13), it came to be the place associated with the kings of the Davidic line. And any true descendant of David, heir to the throne of Israel, and king of the Jews would be expected to hail from Bethleḥem.
THE BENJAMINITES
Although the inspiring tale of Ruth is associated with the beginning of King David’s family tree, a story in Judges 19–21 offers a more revealing glimpse at the tribal and political rivalries that plagued Israel in the early years leading up to the establishment of the Israelite monarchy. This horrific event took place in the town of Gibeah, in the territory of Benjamin, and is significant not only because of the gruesome details of this deadly attack against a sexual slave and what it tells us about the significance of hospitality in the ancient world, but because it sets in motion a series of events that would lead to the near annihilation of the tribe of Benjamin.
Judges 19 tells the story of the gang rape and murder of a runaway concubine from Bethleḥem who was turned over to an angry mob in order to save her Levite owner’s neck. Careful readers of the Bible will notice a similarity between the details of this story and the story Lot just prior to the destruction of Sedom and ‘Amorah (Sodom and Gomorrah) in Genesis 19.8 Ironically, in disgust over the mob’s actions, the concubine’s owner cut her dead body into twelve pieces and sent them to the twelve tribes of Israel to protest the inhospitality against him. This ignited the Battle of Gibeah, in which members of the other eleven tribes of Israel attacked the Benjamites, who had rushed to defend the perpetrators of the crime at Gibeah. The tribe of Benjamin was nearly annihilated as part of a mass honor killing to avenge the mistreatment of the Levite (and his concubine).
That is the story of the Benjaminites. That’s how the tribe of Benjamin was nearly wiped out and was (forcibly) reconstituted according to the Bible. And this was the fate of the town of Gibeah following its involvement in the murder of a Levite’s concubine. For those of you asking what the story of Judges 19–21 has to do with Bethleḥem (other than the fact that the murdered concubine was from there), allow me to explain how this is relevant.
Yes, the murdered concubine was from Bethleḥem. But this grisly story was included in the Bible because 1 Samuel 9:1–2 tells us that the first king of Israel, Saul, was from the tribe of Benjamin. Thus, we can begin to see why the Bible’s editors might have wanted to retain the macabre tale of the hometown of an early rival of King David. Saul was from Gibeah of Benjamin, while David was from Bethleḥem of Judah. The Bible tells the story of the struggle between Saul and David, because it favors the transition of power in ancient Israel from the tribe of Benjamin (and King Saul) to the tribe of Judah (and King David). This may explain why the editors of the Bible chose to include the horrific story of the murdered concubine in Judges 19 and the subsequent story of the near annihilation of the tribe of Benjamin in Judges 20–21; the Bible’s editors wanted to offer an additional reason why God dismissed Saul in favor of David as king. Although the two tribes for all intents and purposes came to be understood as a single state following the rebellion of Jeroboam, the inclusion of Judges 19–21 helps to sway the opinions of the readers of the story against Benjamin and toward Judah. Understanding the rivalry between Saul and David helps explain why such a morally reprehensible set of stories would have been included in the Bible.
Once again, this shift from Saul to David and from Gibeah of Benjamin to Bethleḥem of Judah helps us understand how the tradition that the promised messiah of Israel was to come from Bethleḥem was established. Simply put, because David was the first messiah from Bethleḥem, the prophets argued that all of Israel’s subsequent messiahs, or anointed kings (from the Hebrew mashaḥ, , meaning “to smear” and in the context of the monarchy “to anoint” with oil) must be born in David’s hometown of Bethleḥem. The famous prophecy of Micah reflects this expectation: “But you, O Bethlehem of Ephrathah, who are one of the little clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to rule in Israel, whose origin is from of old, from ancient days” (5:2; 5:1 HB).
And thus Bethleḥem became the city that built the monarchy of Israel; at least that was the expectation as long as Israel and (later) Judah retained independent control over their relative kingdoms. But after Judah’s defeat and Jerusalem’s destruction at the hands of King Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon (2 Kings 25), the Davidic line came to an end. However, David’s association with Bethleḥem continued and later influenced the authors of the Gospels to believe that the promised messiah of Israel would be born in the little town of Bethleḥem. And that most famous of Bethleḥemites was none other than Jesus . . . of Nazareth.
BETHLEḤEM, NAZARETH, AND JESUS
We’ve all been taught that Bethleḥem was the birth
place of Jesus. However, two of the canonical Gospels (Mark and John) never associate Jesus with Bethleḥem, and the apostle Paul makes no mention of Bethleḥem in any of his writings (or of Nazareth, for that matter).9 When referring to Jesus, Paul always calls him some combination of “Jesus,” “Christ,” and “Lord,” but never includes Bethleḥem or Nazareth. So with no mention of Bethleḥem in connection with Jesus in fully one-half of the canonical Gospels and in the writings of Paul or, for that matter, in any of the remainder of the New Testament books, we come to the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. It is while reading Matthew and Luke that we first realize that Bethleḥem is only referred to in the birth narratives of Jesus. In all other references, when a location is used in relation to Jesus, he is consistently referred to as “Jesus of Nazareth,” never “Jesus of Bethleḥem.”
So Jesus’s relationship to Bethleḥem in the New Testament is limited to the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke. Although this might seem to be the end of the peculiarities surrounding Jesus’s association with Bethleḥem, when we actually read the two birth narratives alongside one another, we immediately notice another problem—one with which biblical scholars for centuries have been struggling: Where did Jesus live at the time of his birth?
And there is one other issue we must examine, and this is where Nazareth collides with Bethleḥem. Simply put, Jesus has a Nazareth problem, and his Nazareth problem is this: Jesus was from Nazareth. The reason the question of where Jesus lived at the time of his birth has perplexed scholars for so long is because Matthew and Luke give two different answers to this question. Let us first look at Matthew’s account of Jesus’s birth to see if we can identify the problem and find a solution.
MATTHEW’S ACCOUNT
After the opening lines of Matthew’s Gospel, which consist solely of a genealogy designed to show that Jesus is of the line of David and therefore eligible to be the anointed king and promised Messiah of Israel, Matthew 2:1 reads, “In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem.” Notice that at no time prior to this in Matthew’s Gospel does the author say anything about Nazareth. The first location that is given in Matthew comes in 2:1, where it reads, “after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea.” In Matthew’s Gospel, it is simply implied that Jesus and his family lived in Bethleḥem and that Jesus was born at home! There is no prior mention of Nazareth, no story of a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, no manger, no barn, no cave or grotto, nothing! Matthew simply relates that Jesus had been born in Bethleḥem of Judea.
And the farther we read in Matthew, the more we see that Jesus and his family simply lived in Bethleḥem. Note the response to King Herod after he asked the chief priests and the scribes where the Messiah was to be born:
They told him, “In Bethlehem of Judea; for so it has been written by the prophet: ‘And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah; for from you shall come a ruler who is to shepherd my people Israel.’” (2:5–6)
Because the prophecy of Micah 5:2 was interpreted as a prediction that the messianic king of Israel would come from Bethleḥem, the author of Matthew was sure to include the prophecy in his narrative, as this advanced Matthew’s agenda of portraying Jesus as the promised messianic son of David. But anyone who reads Matthew 2:6 will quickly notice that the prophecy quoted to King Herod is actually a combination of biblical texts. The first part comes from Micah 5:2, which predicts that the Messiah will come from Bethleḥem, and the second part comes from 2 Samuel 5:2, which recalls when the tribes of Israel came to David at Ḥebron to pledge their allegiance to him and anoint him king over Israel. These two texts are combined because they share the theme that the leader of Israel will come from line of David and from his hometown of Bethleḥem.10
The second bit of evidence that suggests that Jesus and his family had been living in a home in Bethleḥem at the time of his birth comes from the story of the Magi, who had come to worship Jesus. Matthew 2:11 clearly states, “On entering the house (οἰκίαν, oikian), they saw the child.” Matthew’s Gospel again suggests that Jesus was not born in a manger in a barn, but in a house. Because there is no story of a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, this was likely the home in which Jesus and his family resided in Bethleḥem.
According to Matthew, Joseph is then warned in a dream to take Mary and Jesus and flee to Egypt, as Herod the Great was coming to kill Jesus. This flight to Egypt, which is not mentioned in the Gospel of Luke, gives Matthew the additional opportunity to cast Jesus as the “new Moses,” a new Jewish lawgiver like Moses. Matthew 2:15 further underscores the connection to Moses by citing Hosea 11:1: “Out of Egypt I called my son.”
Matthew 2:16 provides a final piece of evidence suggesting that in Matthew’s Gospel Joseph, Mary, and Jesus lived in a house in Bethleḥem. According to the text, when Herod the Great heard that the Magi had tricked him, he “killed all the children in and around Bethleḥem who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had learned from the wise men.” In addition to being yet another episode that is not mentioned in Luke’s birth narrative, this text states that Herod didn’t just kill all the newborns, but all of the children two years old and younger, “according to the time that he had learned from the wise men,” suggesting that the elapsed time between Jesus’s birth and Herod’s “slaughter of the innocents” was at least a year, if not two. Herod wanted to make sure that he killed the child Jesus, so he slaughtered all of the children who could have possibly been born in the two-year period since Jesus’s birth. Since pilgrims traveling to Jerusalem from Nazareth to register for a census (Luke 2:4) didn’t typically stay for a year or two, this suggests that according to Matthew Jesus was born at his family’s home in Bethleḥem.11
Thus, the trek to Egypt provided Matthew with a mechanism to harmonize his tradition that Jesus was born at home in Bethleḥem, as should all of the Davidic kings of Israel, with the tradition that Jesus was raised in Nazareth.
LUKE’S ACCOUNT
The Gospel of Luke, however, goes about solving these conflicting Bethleḥem and Nazareth traditions differently. After providing the lengthy backstory of the birth of Jesus’s cousin, John the Baptist, Luke 1:26–27 states that the angel Gabri’el was sent to “a town in Galilee called Nazareth” to inform Mary of her impending pregnancy. And other than Mary’s trip to an unspecified Judean town in the hill country (1:39) to stay with Elizabeth for three months, Luke makes no mention of any town in the remainder of chapter 1.
Luke then employs a highly problematic census in order to provide a mechanism by which Jesus could be born in Bethleḥem, since according to Luke’s Gospel Jesus’s family lived in Nazareth:
In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration and was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria. All went to their own towns to be registered. Joseph also went from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to the city of David called Bethlehem, because he was descended from the house and family of David. He went to be registered with Mary, to whom he was engaged and who was expecting a child. (2:1–5)
With its tall green cupola, the Basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth is built over the traditional spot where the angel Gabri’el announced to Mary that she would give birth to Jesus.
The altar of the Basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth sits in a cave traditionally thought to be the home of the Virgin Mary.
Luke’s census is problematic for a number of reasons. First, censuses were taken for the purpose of taxation. Although there are certainly literary records of censuses taking place throughout the Roman Empire at this time,12 there is no evidence that those who were being counted were required to travel to their ancestral hometowns in order to be counted. Indeed, an Egyptian census edict of Gaius Vibius Maximus, the Roman prefect of Egypt from 103 to 107, did require that “all persons who for any reason whatsoever are absent from their home districts be al
erted to return to their own hearths, so that they may complete the customary formalities of registration and apply themselves to the farming for which they are responsible.”13
Although this edict of Gaius Vibius Maximus does mention a return home for the purposes of taxation, residents were not required to return to their ancestral homes, but to their present homes, so that both people and assets could be assessed for purposes of taxation. Essentially you couldn’t be “out of town” when the government came to take the census and collect taxes. Indeed, traveling to one’s ancestral home would not allow pilgrims to “apply themselves to the farming for which they are responsible.” Rather, residents under Roman rule were to go to their present homes so that they and their possessions could be counted and taxed. Luke further strains credulity by arguing that the nine-months-pregnant Mary would have made the arduous three-day journey from Nazareth to Bethleḥem. Thus, any registration would have required Joseph and his family to return to their present homes to be counted, and Jesus’s present home was in Nazareth, not Bethleḥem.
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