g area into which the family cow or donkey is brought at night (Arabic ka’al-bayt). The family animals were kept in the one-room house at night,

of the house. With calm assurance Jesus could announce to his face that he did, in fact, lead his animals out that very morning, confident there would be no reply. Were animals kept in a separate stable, the head of the synagogue could have saved face by asserting firmly, “I never touch the animals on the Sabbath.” But if he tried to claim that he leaves the animals in the house all day, the people in the synagogue would ridicule him with laughter! In short, no one would believe him. Thus the debate ends simply, “As he said this, all his adversaries were put to shame” (v.17). Thus, in the case of Luke 2:7, any Palestinian reading the phrase, “She laid him in a manger,” would immediately assume that the birth took place in a private home, because he knows that mangers are built into the floor of the raised terrace of the peasant home. This assumption is an important part of the story. The shepherds were told that the presence of the baby in a manger was a sign for them. Shepherds were near the bottom of the social ladder and indeed, their profession was declared unclean by some of their rabbis.10 Many places would not welcome them. In many homes they would feel their poverty and be ashamed of their low estate. But no—they faced no humiliation as they visited that child, for he was laid in a manger. That is, he was born in a simple peasant home with the mangers in the family room. He was one of them. With that assurance they left with haste. The details of the one-room peasant home with its manger in the floor have not gone unnoticed. William Thomson,long- term Presbyterian missionary in Lebanon, Syria and Palestine, wrote in 1857: It is my impression that the birth actually took place in an ordinary house of some common peasant, and that the baby was laid in one of the mangers, such as are still found in the dwellings of farmers in this region.11 The two leading 20th century authorities on Palestinian life and the New Testament are Gustaf Dalmann and E.F.F. Bishop. Bishop comments on Luke 2:7 and writes: Perhaps...recourse was had to one of the Bethlehem houses with the lower section provided for the animals, with mangers “hollowed in stone,” the dais being reserved for the family. Such a manger being immovable, filled with crushed straw, would do duty for a cradle. An infant might even be left in safety, especially if swaddled, when the mother was absent on temporary business.12 Dalmann, in his study of the same verse, records: In the East today the dwelling place of man and beast is often in one and the same room. It is quite the usual thing among the peasants for the family to live, eat, and sleep on a kind of raised terrace (Arab. mastaba) in the one room of the house, while the cattle, particularly the donkeys and oxen, have their place below on the actual floor (ka’ al-bet) near the door.... On this floor the mangers are fixed either to the floor or to the wall, or at the edge of the terrace.13 Dalmann himself has nearly 100 pages of photographs and scale drawings of a wide variety of such peasant homes, all of which fit his two-level description given above.14 Thus a peasant home is the natural place for the Holy Family to have found shelter and the expected place to find a manger. In the case of Luke 2:7 the home which entertained the Holy Family presumably was not expecting a baby and did not have a cradle, but with a manger built into the floor there was little need for one.15 So why has this rather obvious alternative remained obscured? In some cases it would seem that the cultural assumptions of the exegetes have set it aside. In spite of the above quotation, Dalmann defends the traditional “lonely birth in a stable” for culturally revealing reasons. Dalmann feels Joseph could have had space in the inn, but “no room for them” means “no suitable room for the birth” (italics mine).16 Dalmann argues that neither “inn,” nor “guest house,” nor “private home” would have provided the necessary privacy, and thus Joseph must have sought out and found an empty stable.



In defense of his views Dalmann writes
Anyone who has lodged with Palestinian peasants knows that notwithstanding their hospitality the lack of privacy is unspeakably painful. One cannot have a room to oneself, and one is never alone by day or by night. I myself often fled into the open country simply in order to be able to think.17 The amazing part of Dalmann’s remarkable discussion is the assumption that the Holy Family wanted to be alone. Rather, it is the German professor who finds the lack of privacy “unspeakably painful,” not the Palestinian peasant. For the Middle Eastern peasant the exact opposite is true. To be alone is unspeakably painful. He does his thinking in a crowd. Naturally, in the case of a birth, the men will sit apart with the neighbors, but the room will be full of women assisting the midwife.18 A private home would have bedding, facilities for heating water and all that is required for any peasant birth. Dalmann’s Western sense of the need for privacy has led him to misread his own meticulously gathered data. His conclusion, that the need for privacy would have forced Mary and Joseph to reject the option of either inn or home in preference for an empty stable, is truly incredible when seen from a Middle Eastern point of view. Brown observes that in inns people slept on a raised terrace with the animals in the same room. He remarks, “The public inns of the time should not be pictured as snug or comfortable according to medieval or modern standards.19 This we grant. But our point is that a room full of people sleeping together with the animals on a lower level in the same room is snug and comfortable in the eyes of the traditional Middle Eastern gregarious peasant, even in modern times. These reservations can be set aside; and we can say in summary that all aspects of the story, from the precise requirements of the text, to the structure of the peasant home, the dynamics of the extended family, and the sociology of the peasant village, point to a birth in a private home. 1800 view of Bethlehem as it looked and was drawn by the writer J. Leslie Porter who spent years living in Palestine. This brings us to the second half of our inquiry. What, then, was the “inn”? The traditional understanding of Luke 2:7b, “For there was no place for them in the kataluma,” is that Joseph went to the local commercial inn and was turned away, and then sought shelter in a stable, perhaps the stable of the inn itself. This understanding is seen here as inadequate, from both a cultural and linguistic point of view. In this section we will try to demonstrate that the crowded kataluma was most probably the “guest room” of the home in which the Holy Family found lodging. This key word, kataluma, which in the West is traditionally translated as “inn,” has at least five meanings. Three of these— “inn,” “house,” and “guest room” —are worth considering in connection with Luke 2:7, and must be examined in turn. First is the traditional &ldquRosetta Stone Spanish