It was almost dawn before they finished loading their belongings on the backs of the two animals. Jesus had been sleeping in the cradle Joseph had made for Him, and their last act before leaving Bethlehem was to lash this on top of one of the packs. Mary would walk and carry the baby in her arms much of the time, but for the rest of it He could lie in the cradle while she walked beside the animal. With her hand to steady the cradle, the rocking gait of the mule would lull the child to sleep. Whatever discomfort Joseph and Mary were to experience in this abrupt flight from their homeland, they were determined that Jesus should know as little of it as possible.
II
As they left Bethlehem dawn was breaking over the range of hills to the east that hid the leaden surface of the Sea of Judgment and the sulfurous mists, relics of the brimstone which had destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, rising from it. The town still slept and Joseph led the pack animals carefully lest their footfalls arouse the soldiers of the small garrison assigned there to keep order and remind the people not to cheat the tax gatherers. They would have had trouble enough explaining why they were moving southward at such an hour, and if the treasures hidden deep inside the roll of sleeping pallets were discovered, could hope for nothing less severe than being hailed before a magistrate to explain whence such valuable things came.
As they took the road to Hebron, the castle of Herodeion was a grim reminder to them of the reason for their flight, but they did not yet feel the wrench of parting that would be their experience when they left Israel itself. Hebron, seventeen miles away, was the home of Elisabeth and Zacharias to whom Mary had gone after the angel’s announcement of Jesus’ conception. To anyone who questioned them, they planned to answer merely that they were going to visit this well-known priest and his family.
The road to Hebron led through a region rich in the history of Israel. When God had promised this land to the seed of Abraham, Hebron was already a chief city of the great Hittite Empire. Rameses II, the Pharaoh from whose grip Moses had delivered the Children of Israel, had broken the back of the Hittite confederation, but the promise of God to Abraham had not been completely fulfilled until Joshua had given Hebron and the surrounding territory to Caleb, his faithful lieutenant and the only other man of the generation that left Egypt to enter the Promised Land. In the cave of Machpelah near Hebron, Abraham had buried his beloved wife Sarah. There, too, his own body lay with that of Jacob, brought up out of Egypt by his son Joseph in a magnificent funeral procession.
Altogether this was hallowed ground through which Joseph and Mary passed as they fled toward Egypt with Jesus. Long a heritage of the priests of Israel, Hebron was also a city of refuge, but Joseph knew the reputation of Herod and dared not rely upon his respecting that ancient tradition. They paused there only long enough to spend the night with Zacharias and Elisabeth, and to see the son born to them after the vision of Zacharias in the temple and dedicated by the Most High as a prophet. Some six months older than Jesus, John was a fine, strapping boy and a joy to his parents in these their later years.
Early the next morning the travelers set out again along the road leading to the border of Egypt at Beersheba, only a day’s travel southward. The roadsides around Hebron were lined with grape arbors, the vines now bare of leaves. For over two thousand years much of the wine of Hebron had been boiled down to about one-third of its bulk to form a syrup called dibash or honey, some of which Jacob had sent to Egypt as a present to his son Joseph, long since given up for dead after being sold into slavery by his brothers.
On some other occasion Joseph and Mary might have enjoyed traveling through this region, so sacred to the history of Israel, but they could not help feeling sad now at leaving the land they loved. At Beersheba they crossed over the border into Egypt and, continuing two more days through the Wilderness of Shur, came to the “River of Egypt” which Moses had been instructed by God to use as a part of the borders of the Promised Land of Canaan. At Migdol, the frontier fortress of Egypt, they passed through the customs and at last were safe from Herod.
To a Jew, Egypt was a land of opportunity second only to his homeland. Greatly favored by Alexander when he had conquered Egypt, large numbers of Jews had migrated into the country. Here they had prospered and in some places, notably Alexandria, formed a large and racially distinct group with their own ethnarch as governor. As a skilled worker in wood, Joseph had little trouble in gaining membership in the guild of carpenters when he arrived at Tanis, the first large city south of the border. Here, in a friendly and warm land at the mouth of the Nile, he settled his family and began to work.
Even though far from his home in Israel, Joseph was not handling alien timber. Almost thirteen hundred years earlier, Israelite slaves had labored in this very city, building for their Egyptian masters. Jewish hands had helped care for the forests which now provided timbers for Joseph’s saw, adze, chisels, and drills.
More recently Cleopatra had conspired with Mark Antony to deprive Herod for a while of most of the marvelously valuable seacoast cities of Palestine, as well as the lovely city of Jericho with its surrounding fields and gardens. There grew the balsam bush said to have come first from seeds brought as a gift to King Solomon by the Queen of Sheba. Cuttings of balsam, along with many other plants that flourished in warm and sunny Jericho, long favored as a winter resort by Romans and rich Jews, had been transferred at Cleopatra’s order to the banks of the Nile where they grew and thrived as an herbal garden in the nearby city called On by the Jews. Although both Joseph and Mary yearned for beautiful Galilee, for all that was so particularly lacking in the flat Nile delta—the hills, valleys, and rushing streams of that mountainous land—yet they could hardly help being happy in Egypt. Jesus, too, thrived and was soon toddling about, exploring the exciting world of early childhood.
III
As he waited for the Magi to return and betray the whereabouts of the infant Messiah, Herod had grown more and more impatient, finally sending an envoy to Bethlehem in search of them. When the envoy came back with news that the wise men had departed for Arabia by the southern route, the king realized that they had fully understood the nature of his interest in the child whose star had led them from the east and had taken the alternate route homeward to avoid revealing His whereabouts.
Enraged at being thwarted in his intention to kill this child whose birth the star had announced, Herod next did a thing which for sheer horror eclipsed any of his previous crimes. An order was issued that all children under the age of two in Bethlehem and its immediate environs should be killed. The star had been seen by the Magi only a little more than a year before, and Herod thought by this brutal slaughter of innocent babes to be certain of destroying the child who was the Messiah. Hebron was not included in the sweeping edict, and the son of Zacharias and Elisabeth was spared. But there was weeping and wailing in Bethlehem as had been foretold by the prophet Jeremiah who said long ago, “A voice was heard in Ramah, lamentation, weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.”
Time was running out for Herod, too. Seventy years old and afflicted with a terrible disease that eroded his body with the same implacability he had displayed in destroying even those he loved most, he sought desperately for some way to defeat death. Borne to the baths of Callirrhoe beyond the Jordan, he found no relief even in these highly prized medicinal waters. Finally he was carried to the place he loved most, his palace at Jericho, where he prepared to die.
Even before death claimed Herod, the people had begun to rebel against his needless cruelties and his contempt for the one thing they revered most of all, the inviolability of their God. Although he had rebuilt the temple to please the priests and the people and to entrench himself as their king, he had also erected the forbidding fortress of Antonia at one corner of the sanctuary area so that his troops and the Roman cohorts which helped him keep Israel in subjection could be constantly alert for any s
ign of disturbance in Jerusalem. Above the entrance to the fortress he had placed a great golden eagle, the emblem of Rome, insulting the devout Jews of Jerusalem who had never forgiven him this indignity. Now that Herod was on the point of death they rose in revolt. Two rabbis, Judas and Matthias, led a party against the fortress and tore down the golden emblem.
Captured by the guards, the leaders of the revolt were brought to trial before the dying king. From his couch Herod judged and pronounced sentence; the prisoners were to be burned alive. When this only stirred the passion for freedom in thousands of others who wished to free their land from all foreign domination and set up a king from the line of David, Herod had ordered many of the noblest men of Israel shut up in the great hippodrome which he had erected in Jerusalem for the games, aping his masters in Rome whom he had always sought to please.
Convinced that his own son, Antipater, was conspiring against him, Herod seemed to linger on only to receive the permission he had requested of the Emperor Augustus to execute his own son. This given and the sentence promptly carried out, the king lived only five days more. Buried in splendor in the castle of Herodeion, whose grim bulwarks Joseph had seen on the day when he and Mary had hurried to Bethlehem and again on their flight into Egypt, Herod ended a reign of thirty-seven of the bloodiest, yet, strangely enough, the most prosperous, years Israel had ever experienced.
By Herod’s will, Archelaus, son of Malthace, a Samaritan woman, was made ruler of Judea. Antipas, a younger brother to Archelaus and also called Herod, was given the governorship of Galilee and Peraea with the title of tetrarch, a sort of lesser king. Philip, son of Cleopatra of Jerusalem, was made tetrarch of that part of Herod’s kingdom lying northeast of the River Jordan. Not one of Herod’s sons inherited the title, King of the Jews.
Archelaus quickly proved himself another Herod in cruelty. Embarking upon a reign of terror, he sold the office of high priest to the highest bidder and sought to destroy all who dared resist him. His reign, though short, was turbulent and violent, ending finally in removal from office, trial before the emperor in Rome, and banishment to Vienne in Gaul. Judea was never again to know a king, for Rome now appointed procurators, civil servants who were responsible directly to the emperor.
IV
To Joseph, living quietly with Mary and Jesus on the banks of the Nile in Egypt, the angel of the Lord came once again in a dream with the command that he should return now to Israel. Echoes of the turbulence which had kept the district of Judea a virtual battleground since their escape had come even to Egypt, so Joseph chose to return to Nazareth rather than go to the City of David. And since he desired no contact with the reign of terror Archelaus was carrying out in Judea, he kept to the westward and came into Galilee from that direction.
Traveling as did thousands of wayfarers each year along the Way of the Sea, the great caravan route between Damascus and the cities of Egypt and one of the oldest thoroughfares in the world, Joseph and his family journeyed by way of Gaza, Ascalon, Jamnia, and Lydda, leaving Jerusalem well to the east. From Lydda, they went by way of Antipatris, keeping largely to the border between the Plain of Sharon and hilly Samaria, which was under the dominion of Archelaus. Following the eastern border of the Plain of Sharon and leaving the Roman capital of Caesarea on the seacoast to the west, they turned northeastward then toward Nazareth in the hills of southern Galilee.
Chapter 6
And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and men.
Luke 2:52
Upper Galilee, a land of mountains, caves, and passes, was a region of vast panoramas, crisp air, and rugged people. This same ruggedness produced many who fought against authority under the leadership of men who rose now and then to rebel against the yoke of Rome and the Herods. Judas the Gaulonite had come from this region and because of him many hundreds of Jews had been crucified before the government center of Sepphoris when he led a rebellion against Roman rule. Thus the dwellers in southern Galilee, the most populous and orderly portion of the land, distrusted northerners and gave them a wide berth whenever possible.
South of Lake Huleh the Way of the Sea crossed the turbulent Jordan by way of the Jisr Benat Yakub, the “bridge of Jacob’s daughters.” Icy cold and bluish green in color, the river hurried on to plunge into the Sea of Galilee. Along the river banks grew oleanders with beautiful white and pink blossoms and the tall, fanlike papyrus from which for thousands of years Egyptians had made long rolls for writing upon. Also growing there was the balsam whose nutlike fruit contained an oil much prized for making the famous “Balm of Gilead.” This was the same balm the Ishmaelites had been taking to Egypt to sell when they had found the sons of Jacob in the act of conspiring to slay their brother Joseph.
The region just west of the Sea of Galilee was a land of broad fields and gently rolling hills. Here Asher had “dipped his foot in oil”—the oil that flowed like a river from the olive presses at harvest time—and had been blessed. Truly was it said, “It is easier to raise a legion of olives in Galilee than one child in the land of Judea.”
In the lovely sunny land, away from the teeming cities of the lake, grapevines hung heavy with fruit and the wine was generous and rich. Grain sowed in the fall grew during the mild winters to a harvest of bounteous proportions. When wheat fields were ready for harvest, the heavy heads of grain bowed down in waves with a hissing noise as they rubbed together. Then the farmer would know the time had come to put in his sickle and reap the grain.
Living was not hard in Galilee as it was in Judea, where prices were often five times as high. In fact, so plump and tasty were the fruits of this region, particularly the Plain of Gennesaret lying on the northwestern shore of the lake, that the priests at Jerusalem would not allow them to be sold there at festival time, lest people from less favored sections come only to taste the fruits and forget their duties at the temple.
Life was busy and active in Galilee. In the towns many artisans labored, while shepherds, farmers, and the keepers of vineyards worked busily in the surrounding countryside. From the higher hills the eye could look westward to the Great Sea with its busy harbors and watch the many-oared vessels plying between them. Smoke rose from dozens of potteries and from furnaces where sand was melted into glass which Phoenician blowers expanded into delicate vases and other articles to be sold in the markets of the world. Weavers, dyers, and workers in wood and metal were always busy, for the excellence of their craftsmanship was widely known and the caravans moving westward to the market at Ptolemais on the seacoast were eager to purchase their products.
Jesus was a little over two years old when Joseph brought his family back to Nazareth. He was a sturdy boy toddling about, eager to explore the wonders of a small child’s world when His father set up his carpenter shop once again. Since Joseph worked for the most part in the open court adjoining the house, that part of the home was naturally taboo for the boy, but in sleepy, quiet Nazareth there was still much to attract His eager curiosity.
Jewish home life was a warm and pleasant thing, the ties that bound parents and children very strong. Having been weaned at the age of two, as was customary, Jesus was no longer known by the diminutive of jonek, meaning “sucker,” but was now gamul, the “weaned one.” The weaning and their arrival from Egypt were celebrated with a feast, to which the many relatives of Mary and Joseph in this region were invited, some coming from as far away as Capernaum and Bethsaida on the shores of the beautiful lake, where several cousins near Jesus’ own age lived.
The early years passed quickly and almost before Mary realized it, her son was no longer gamul, but taph, an active growing boy able to run and play with the other children. Early in boyhood the children of the village were sent out to watch the flocks by day. It was easy work, most of it play as they raced about the hillsides or swam in the brooks in summer, for all Jewish families were strictly enjoined to teach their children to swim. In the evening they would dri
ve the flocks back to the safety of the fenced area just outside the town, and afterwards there would be exciting games in the streets and along the steep hillside overlooking the city.
At the age of five, Jewish children were expected, according to an ancient tradition, to begin reading the scrolls of the Torah in Hebrew, but this was generally done with only those who showed considerable precocity. Jesus belonged to this latter class, but His instruction was carried out first in the home, since He was too small as yet to be sent to the town school which was held in the synagogue. Everything about His everyday life and education was intended to inculcate in Him a love for God and God’s Law, the dominant force in all Jewish life.
An ever-present reminder of every Jew’s obligation to his God was the mezuzah attached to the doorpost of each dwelling. A small square of parchment, folded lengthwise, it contained exactly twenty-two lines from the words of God to Moses beginning:
Hear, 0 Israel! The Lord our God, the Lord is one!
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,
with all your soul, and with all your strength.
The quotation from the ancient writings ended with the admonition which was the fountainhead of all teaching among, the Jews:
These words which I command you today shall be in your heart.
You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates,
The Crown and the Cross: The Life of Christ Page 6