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

t be counted among the rebels—would abandon his kiln and forsake 22 of his valuable wares that would provide his livelihood upon relocating to a

Ben-Tor was not the first to find evidence of the violent destruction of LB-I Hazor atop the tel, as Yadin found it also. Adjacent to the king’s palace in Area A, a rectangular building dubbed the Long Temple was uncovered during Yadin’s excavations. The plan of this possibly “royal temple” is architecturally similar to that of Megiddo VIII, and it had an east-west orientation with an entrance on the eastern side. Several cultic installations were found all around the perimeter of the ruined temple, and particularly noticeable were many pits containing sacrificial remains (animal-bones, and large quantities of votive bowls within and outside the building). The remains of this important LB-I temple were covered by a thick layer of brick debris, indicating not only its destructive end but its abandonment and non-use in subsequent periods. While Yadin believed that the Long Temple was used in both the MB II and LB I Age (Yadin, The Head, 102–103), a closer analysis of this structure and related architectural elements has demonstrated that it was constructed in and confined to the LB I Age, not to mention the fact that the temple was found to be built on LB-I remains, which prohibits its use during the MB Age (Ruhama Bonfil and Raphael Greenberg, Hazor V: An Account of the Fifth Season of Excavation, 1968, ed. Amnon Ben-Tor and Ruhama Bonfil (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1997], 85, 89; Aren M. Maeir, In the Midst of the Jordan:: The Jordan Valley during the Middle Bronze Age [Circa 2000–1500 BCE], Archaeological and Historical Correlates [Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2010], 44–45). In fairness to Yadin, he was correct, and the later authors of Hazor V, who suggest that the temple was not abandoned until the LB II period, were in error regarding the terminal use of the temple. All of the vessels on the temple’s floor date to the LB I phase, and the only LB-II vessels found in the vicinity were on the course of the broken wall. In addition, the placement of a later “installation” that was used during both phases of LB II—in which a tall basaltic stele dating to the earlier phase and several small stelae dating to the later phase were found—in the immediate vicinity of the Long Temple should not be used as a basis for declaring the temple’s continued use into the LB II Age.50. Yadin, The Head, 141.51. See “2000 Excavation Report,” on the webpage http://unixware.mscc.huji.ac.il/~hatsor/hazor.html. Bracketed insertions were added in order to clarify various identifications that are not discernable without the entire context of the excavation report.52. See “2001 Excavation Report,” on the webpage http://unixware.mscc.huji.ac.il/~hatsor/hazor.html.53. See the webpage http://exegesisinternational.org/index.php?option=com_deeppockets&task=contShow&id=2&Itemid=30 for several examples of this burnline and other burned remains.54. In his discussion of the upper city during the Late Bronze I Age, Yadin laments that many conclusions regarding the evaluation of structures, installations, and finds are difficult to make, owing to the enormous amount of leveling and looting that took place on the tel during the Solomonic period (Yadin, The Head, 125).55. Wood, “Let the Evidence Speak,” 78.56. Amnon Ben-Tor, “News and Notes,” IEJ 51:2 (2001), 238.57. Donald B. Redford, Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 160.58. Yadin, The Head, 200.59. James B. Pritchard, ANET (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950), 242. Hazor is mentioned in a topographical list of Amenhotep II at Karnak (Bienkowski, “Role of Hazor,” 54).60. Omar Zuhdi, “Combined Arms Egyptian Style: Thutmose III Crosses the Euphrates,” KMT 18:3 (Fall 2007), 56.61. Pritchard, ANET, 239.62. Donald B. Redford, Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 158.63. Hoffmeier emphasizes that the conquest list of Thutmose III for this campaign was not a record of destroyed cities (James K. Hoffmeier, “Reconsidering Egypt’s Part in the Termination of the Middle Bronze Age in Palestine,” Levant 21 [1989], 187).64. As Hoffmeier correctly explains during his discussion of the primary battle of this campaign, which was fought at Megiddo, “While it is true that Thutmose III was concerned to have order and loyalty in Canaan, he was not going to destroy cities that could be useful to him” (Ibid., 187). For this reason, Hoffmeier concludes that Megiddo was not razed either, despite this city’s distinction of being the site from where the king of Kadesh launched his rebellion against the Egyptians at the outset of Thutmose III’s sole rule.65. Thutmose III undoubtedly would have followed the same foreign policy as that of the earlier pharaohs of the 18th Dynasty, including his grandfather, Thutmose I, who set the precedent for his progeny by venturing through Canaan and into Mesopotamia. “Because of Egyptian economic interest in the region, it would make little sense to adopt a scorched earth policy in Canaan. . . . [W]hen Thutmose I acceded the throne, he was able to march, apparently unmolested, all the way to the Euphrates river” (James K. Hoffmeier, “Aspects of Egyptian Foreign Policy in the 18th Dynasty in Western Asia and Nubia,” in Egypt, Israel, and the Ancient Mediterranean World: Studies in Honor of Donald B. Redford, ed. Gary N. Knoppers and Antoine Hirsch [Leiden: Brill, 2004], 133).66. One author calls the Egyptian advancement into upper Syria a direct attack on Mitanni, “which must long have been seen as one of Thutmose’s manifest goals” (Redford, Egypt, Canaan, and Israel, 159). Another writer suggests, in reference to Thutmose III’s renowned campaign into Mesopotamia, that “[t]his campaign was perhaps intended as a capstone ending a series of military operations begun twelve years earlier with the daring strike through the Aruna Pass at Megiddo” (Zuhdi, “Combined Arms,” 55).



The Gebel Barkal Stele of Thutmose III states that this
conquering pharaoh “crossed the Euphrates after the one who had attacked him, at the head of his armies seeking that feeble enemy [from] the land of Mitanni.” The subsequent victory caused Thutmose III to boast, “There is no opponent of mine in the southern lands, northerners come bowing because of my awe. It was Re who ordained it concerning me, I having bound together the Nine Bows, the islands in the midst of the sea, the Aegean and rebellious foreign lands” (Thutmose III, “The Gebel Barkal Stela of Thutmose III,” in Context of Scripture, vol. 2 [trans. James K. Hoffmeier], 15). All of this causes Hoffmeier to look back on this pharaoh’s first campaign and conclude that it already “suggests that Egypt was moving towards an imperial model of domination” (Hoffmeier, “Egyptian Foreign Policy,” in Egypt, Israel, and the Ancient Mediterranean, 134).67. Hoffmeier, “Egypt’s Part,” 187.68. Yadin, The Head, 32. Yadin’s referenRosetta Stone German