followHIM - Christmas Part 1 • Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick • Dec. 19 - Dec 25

Episode Date: December 14, 2022

Are there parallels between Jesus’s birth in a cave, resting in a stone manger, his burial in a tomb, and his resting place on a stone? Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick explores the possibilities of  census, housing, and manger traditions in the ancient Levant.Please rate and review the podcast!Show Notes (English, French, Spanish, Portuguese): https://followhim.co/old-testament/Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/follow-him-a-come-follow-me-podcast/id1545433056Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/followhimpodcastInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/followhimpodcastSpotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/15G9TTz8yLp0dQyEcBQ8BYThanks to the follow HIM team:Steve & Shannon Sorensen: Executive Producers, SponsorsDavid & Verla Sorensen: SponsorsDr. Hank Smith: Co-hostJohn Bytheway: Co-hostDavid Perry: ProducerKyle Nelson: Marketing, SponsorLisa Spice: Client Relations, Editor, Show NotesJamie Neilson: Social Media, Graphic DesignWill Stoughton: Video EditorKrystal Roberts: Translation Team, English & French Transcripts, WebsiteAriel Cuadra: Spanish TranscriptsIgor Willians: Portuguese Transcripts"Let Zion in Her Beauty Rise" by Marshall McDonaldhttps://www.marshallmcdonaldmusic.com

Welcome to Follow Him, a weekly podcast dedicated to helping individuals and families with their Come Follow Me study. I'm Hank Smith. And I'm John, by the way. We love to learn. We love to laugh. We want to learn and laugh with you. As together, we follow Him. Hello, my friends. Welcome to another episode of Follow Him. It is Christmas time here at Follow Him, and we are excited to talk Christmas. I am here with my joyful co-host, John, by the way. Hi, John. Hi, Hank. I didn't know if I'd be festive or joyful or decking the halls or what. Thank you.

I was reading in the Come Follow Me manual, it says Christmas is known as a joyful season because of the joy that Jesus Christ brings to the world. And I would say that you bring a similar joy, John, by the way. You bring a similar joy into the world. Wow. I'll take it. Thank you. Now, when we're talking Christmas and Old Testament, we need an expert.

Who's joining us today? I'm so glad to have Dr. Jeffrey R. Chadwick back with us to talk about this. He serves at BYU as the Jerusalem Center Professor of Archaeology and Near Eastern Studies, also as a Religious Education Professor of Church History and Jewish Studies. And within the church educational system, his religious education teaching emphasizes the Bible, the New and the Old Testament, Book of Mormon, Church History, Christian History, Judaism, and Islam. He's also host of the annual BYU Passover Cedar each spring, which is one of the largest model cedar programs in the United States. Jeff Chadwick was born and raised in Ogden, Utah, graduated from the world-famous Ben Lomond High School.

I'm reading from his bio, but it is world-famous Ben Lomond High School. I'm reading from his bio, but it is world-famous. He served his mission in West Berlin and West Germany, the old Hamburg mission in the mid-70s. And he and his wife, Kim, are the parents of six adult children, a dozen grandchildren. He earned a bachelor's from Weber State College, a major in political science,

minors in German and police science, a master's from Brigham Young University in international and area studies, focusing on Middle Eastern politics and ancient Near Eastern studies. He also did graduate work in Israel at Tel Aviv University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, while completing his PhD at the University of Utah Middle East Center in Archaeology and Anthropology, specializing in the archaeology of the land of Israel, with a minor in Hebrew, Egyptian, and Aramaic languages. This is incredible. So he's traveled widely with his Jerusalem Center students all over Israel, Jordan, Egypt, and Turkey. He's published more than 70 academic

articles, chapters, studies. I wanted to mention some books. I was excited to have him because of his book called Stone Manger, The Untold Story of the First Christmas. And these are on Kindle, on Amazon. You can find him a couple of articles, one at BYU Studies called Dating the Birth of Jesus Christ. And then later he wrote one called Dating the Death of Jesus Christ. And then later he wrote one called Dating the Death of Jesus Christ. And then another one, and they put them all together in Dating Scripture Events. You just go to byustudies.byu.edu and find these, or to Amazon to find the Stone Manger books. But I'm excited to have him because I love to get closer to what really happened and how do we best understand Christmas and excited to hear especially about his insights about the manger today.

So thank you, Brother Chadwick, for coming back with us and for being so delightful. You had a long drive just to get to the studio today. So you went over the river and through the woods to get here. I did. I live in Weber County and came down to Provo today to record. And I did go over several rivers and through a number of woods, passed about 25 crashes as well. It was a very, very snowy day today. It's just a delight to be with you two great friends and master teachers. And what a great season. It feels Christmassy. And when folks are listening to these things closer to Christmas time, the spirit is already with us, I think.

The Christmas spirit is here. Yep. And we're excited to have you from that bio. My goodness, you are quite qualified to take this on. That's just all stuff. Really, what we just love to do is get into the scriptures and talk about the great things of the gospel. I have the privilege in my ward of being a gospel doctrine teacher, so I'm using Come Follow Me all the time, twice a month, and Come Follow Me suggests that we look at the Old Testament, which is our curriculum still for 2022, and look at those scriptures in the Old Testament that are particularly predictive of

the Christ. But also it says that families ought to read the Christmas story together. Read Matthew 1 and 2. Read Luke 1 and 2. Aside from anything we would say here today, any discussion we would have, if you just with your family, by yourself, whoever's in your household, sit down and read the Christmas story from Matthew and Luke. That will make your season. And it's a great way to start Come Follow Me for next year, because we're going to start with the birth of Christ and the New Testament. So you're getting a good head start. Yeah. So we've got one hand on the Old Testament today and one hand on the New Testament today. We're bridging the two. This is a great discussion because we're going

to bridge over from December to January right here. And I think each of the Come Follow Me manuals so far have a Christmas lesson because it just falls during this week. So this year is particularly nice to say, look at how the Old Testament, I love that word you use, predictive, how it pointed us to Christ. And now we get to look at that. And then next month, I guess, as we start Come Follow Me in the New Testament, read those stories, but let's give them a head start today. Yeah. Let me read this from the manual and then we'll hand it over to you, Jeff. This is a great intro from the Come Follow Me manual. The Old Testament carries a spirit of

eager anticipation. In that way, it's a little bit like the Christmas season. Beginning with Adam and Eve, Old Testament patriarchs, prophets, poets, and people looked forward to better days filled with hope for renewal and deliverance by the Messiah. And the Israelites were frequently in need of that hope, whether they were in captivity of Egypt or Babylon or held captive by their own sin or rebellion. Through it all, prophets reminded them that a Messiah, a deliverer, would come to proclaim liberty to the captives. Where do you want to go from here, Jeff? Where should we start in the Old Testament? Well, you know, as I looked through the Come Follow Me manual for individuals and families,

I was struck with the several passages from the Old Testament that they suggest looking at. And the one that really jumped out at me was Isaiah 11 for a number of reasons. But Isaiah 11, from my perspective, is the great grandpappy prediction of Christ in the entire Old Testament. It is the chief among equals. And I'm not sure everybody recognizes it in that way, but I certainly do. And I think I would focus on that a little bit today as we look at it. I've got my Bible opened here to Isaiah 11. that is itself what we love to call a chiasm, beginning with this great prophecy of a temple in Jerusalem and it being the way that people would come to the Lord. And then from what in chapter two is the great Jerusalem temple prophecy, you proceed through a series of historical events in ancient Israel that point

you toward the ultimate coming of the Messiah of Israel in chapter 11, the rod which would come from the stem of Jesse. And then it ends up with a kind of a summary statement, kind of a victorious song in Isaiah 12 about God being our salvation. The Lord Jehovah is my strength. That whole thing from Isaiah 2 to 12 is this wonderful chiasm with the two big bookends being the prediction of the Jerusalem temple in Isaiah 2 and the prediction of the coming of Messiah in Isaiah 11. I've written about both of these. In fact, we did a very nice

book years ago for the Sperry Symposium on the temple. And I wrote about the great Jerusalem temple prophecy in Isaiah 2. But Isaiah 11 is maybe even more significant because it's about the advent of the Christ, both earthly and millennial. We're applying it to his earthly coming here, but ultimately the earthly coming of Christ is the advent of what he will do for us all for eternity, including the millennial coming. The interesting thing about these chapters before we look at Isaiah 11 is that this is exactly what Nephi focused on. This group of chapters between 2 and 12. Now, he also adds Isaiah 13 and 14 in 2 Nephi 23 and 24. And I suspect that the reason he does that is just because he was wanting also to show how Babylon,

which would destroy his hometown of Jerusalem, would be rewarded for that by being destroyed itself. But the real focus in those chapters in 2 Nephi, from 2 Nephi 12 to 2 Nephi 24, is that great section of Isaiah from Isaiah 2 to Isaiah 12, basically 2 Nephi 12 to 2 Nephi 22. Okay. And it's interesting that Nephi starts with Isaiah 2 and not Isaiah 1. He starts with Isaiah 2 and 2 Nephi 12. And that's where the book naturally starts because Isaiah 1, like D&C 1, is a preface. And the real material starts with Isaiah 2 with a great Jerusalem temple prophecy. But when you're ending up that grand

thing, you start to read this in Isaiah 11, 2 Nephi 21, right? There shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. And the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord, and shall make him of quick understanding in the fear of the Lord. And he shall not judge after the sight of his eyes, neither reprove after the hearing of his ears, but with righteousness shall he judge the poor and reprove with equity for the meek of the earth.

And he shall smite the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips shall he slay the wicked. And righteousness shall be the girdle of his loins, and faithfulness the girdle of his reins. And the wolf shall also dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid and the calf, and the young lion and the fatling together, and the little child shall lead them.

These are very millennial by the time you get to the end of this passage. And it also deals with, of course, what would happen in the time running up to the millennium, which is the gathering of Israel. You run down to verse 10. In that day, there shall be the root of Jesse, which shall stand for an ensign of the people, to which shall the Gentiles seek.

His rest shall be glorious and it shall come to pass. And that day the Lord shall set his hand again the second time to recover the remnant of his people, which shall be left from Assyria. And by the time you get to verse 13, people are gathered and the envy of Ephraim shall depart. The adversaries of Judah shall be cut off and Ephraim shall not envy Judah. Judah shall not vex Ephraim. They come back together as a nation.

So you have the coming of the Messiah, but then also what does that coming lead to? Atonement and righteousness and eventually the culmination of the Lord's grand plan for all the house of Israel. So you've got everything in Isaiah 11, but let's go back for a minute and focus on that first verse of Isaiah 11. There shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. This is understood in Jewish conversation as a messianic prediction, and in all of Christian conversation as a prediction of the coming of the Christ.

Now, Latter-day Saints have approached chapter 11 a little bit differently because of section 113, and I want to come back to that, but let's look at it in its actual context. You have here what we call a synonymous parallel, where Isaiah is saying the same thing with synonyms, saying it twice. A rod, meaning the branch of a tree, shall come forth out of the stem of Jesse, the lower trunk of a tree. The trunk of a tree associated with Jesse will bring forth a branch. It says the very same thing in the next section. A branch will grow out of his roots. So the lower part of a tree and the branch coming out of the upper part of a tree. Jesse is a reference to Davidic lineage. And the Messiah was to come forth from the house of David.

Jesse was the father of David. So you've got the Davidic lineage in the stem of Jesse leading to this rod, a limb of a tree. And then again, you say a branch will grow out of the roots, the roots of David. This is Christ. This is Messiah. This is Jesus. Both of those phrases refer to Jesus coming forth from the lineage of David. And this is the message in the first part of Matthew, that whole genealogy of Jesus is to demonstrate that Jesus, born in Bethlehem, was of the lineage of David going back to Abraham. Because that's what Isaiah predicts is that the Messiah will be the son of David. And all through the New Testament, that's what you'll hear the Jewish people who adored Jesus saying, oh, thou son of David. Now you see that Matthew chapter one, verses five and

six, Obed begat Jesse and Jesse begat David. And it continues on all the way to Jacob begat Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom is born Jesus, who is called Christ. So now what you see is Isaiah 11.1 shows up again in Matthew, and most people don't recognize it. But if you'll just put your finger in Isaiah 11 and go over to Matthew 2, you're going to see something that'll startle you. In Matthew 2, we have in verse 1 that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, and it skips to the story of the wise men and Herod and the wise men visiting the young child in the house that they lived in in Bethlehem. And then, of course, the wise men leaving and Joseph being warned to go to Egypt with Mary and the child, which they do. And when Herod had passed away, it says in verse 19,

the angel tells Joseph it's safe to come back to the land of Israel. So in verse 21, Joseph, Mary, and Jesus come back to the land of Israel. They do not go back to Bethlehem, however, because in verse 22, Joseph is warned, don't do that. Now, Joseph and Mary had moved to Bethlehem on purpose. We'll come back to this in a minute. But they didn't go there as victims of circumstance. They made a deliberate decision to move to Bethlehem so Jesus would be born there and would be known as having been born there

because that was the prediction of Micah, Micah 5. Then you read that in this chapter in Matthew 2. So their intent moving back to Egypt was to go back to Bethlehem, but God warned them not to do that because Herod's son, Archelaus, was crazy and was just as dangerous. So verse 23, which is what we're coming to here, Matthew 2.23 says, He came then and dwelt in a city called Nazareth, which is where both Joseph and Mary were from in the beginning anyway. So they went back home to where their parents were. And they lived in Nazareth. And it says in verse 23 that it might be fulfilled,

which was spoken by the prophets. Notice that word is plural. He shall be called a Nazarene. Now, when I was a missionary 50 years ago, we called that a lost scripture. That passage you read in Matthew 2.23 says he shall be called a Nazarene. That passage, we see that it's supposed to be in the prophets, which means in the Old Testament, and Matthew's quoting it as if it is in his Hebrew Bible. But we don't find a statement anywhere in our Old Testament that says he shall be called a Nazarene. If you look at the list of what Latter-day Saints have traditionally called lost scriptures, this shows up on that list. We kind of love lost scriptures because we think that there were some. And as it turns out, this is not lost at all.

If you go to your Bible dictionary and you read the passage in the Bible dictionary about lost scripture, what it actually will say in there is remarkable. Turns out Matthew 2.23 may not be lost at all. We may just not know what it's referring to. And what it refers to is Isaiah 11.1. And here's why. In Isaiah 11.1, I'm turning back to Isaiah 11.1 now. When you read in English, it says, there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse and a branch shall grow out of his roots. The word branch there is capitalized in your King James version

because it's a reference to Christ and everyone recognizes this is a reference to Christ. In Hebrew, the word for branch is netzer. N-T-Z-R. And you have to add the E's, netzer. And netzer means branch. So it says there, netzer mishorashav, a branch out of his roots. The Messiah is referred to as a netzer in Hebrew. Now netzer is the word from which Nazareth comes from. Okay. Netzer, when it becomes made a city is notzeret. Netzeret. Netzer, notzeret. So Nazareth or notzeret, as we say it in Hebrew, is like saying branchville. And then the way you say a inhabitant of Nazareth, a person who lives in Nazareth, is a Nazri, a branchite, a branch guy. So that what Matthew is doing is actually referring to Isaiah 11.1 and the netzer as being Jesus, and that it's perfectly

appropriate that Jesus grows up in Nazareth and gets to be known as a Nazri because he's the netzer of Isaiah 11.1. And it's not a lost scripture at all. Now, the other thing in Matthew 2.23 is that it says prophets plural. You wonder, well, okay, Isaiah is one prophet, but are there other prophets that refer to Jesus as a branch? Turns out there are. In Jeremiah, you have two passages which refer to Jesus as a branch, Jeremiah 23.5 and Jeremiah 33.15. These, by the way, are in the article called Lost Scripture in the Bible Dictionary, so you can pick these up easily. In Zechariah, there's two passages where Jesus is referred to as a branch, Zechariah 3.8 and Zechariah 6.1. In those four passages, however, they don't use the word netzer. They use a synonym

for the word branch. They use the Hebrew word tzemach, Z-M-A-C-H, tzemach. It again is a synonym. Now, you can say a tree branch differently in several ways in English, right? You can call it a branch, you can call it a limb, you can call it even a stick. And in Hebrew, you have the same thing. You have in chapter 11, a rod, which is a choter. You have a branch, which is a netzer. And then in Jeremiah and Zechariah, you've got a tzemach. But they're all referring to this top of a tree. And so what Matthew is saying is there's numerous prophecies, prophets that said that this Messiah would be this tree branch. But he plays off the one, Isaiah 11.1, from the word Netzer, because Netzer and Natseret, that's where the branch field in the Galilee took its name from. Matthew uses Isaiah

11 and Jeremiah 23, 33 and Zechariah 3 and 6 as the prophets that say that Jesus would be a branch, a Nazareth. And it's not lost at all. It's just that we don't see it in English. But that's what makes Isaiah 11.1 the great granddaddy passage that predicts the Messiah and predicts him not only in the millennial sense, but even at the point where he would grow up his origins in Nazareth. This is awesome, Jeff. And if you see an olive tree, all of a sudden out of the ground will come this brand new olive tree. And you're like, was this just grow up there all by itself from seed?

No, it's growing out of a root. It's growing out of root. And what are those roots? Those roots are the Davidic lineage. And the upper part of the tree is the Messiah branching out and doing all of his things. Now, there's something that I wanted to follow up with here because we have in section 113, a remarkable teaching moment from the prophet Joseph Smith, where they address Isaiah 11. And in section 113, the question is, what's meant by the rod and by the stem of Jesse? And in section 113, the stem of Jesse is identified as Christ rather than the rod. The bottom part of the tree is identified as Christ.

So Joseph Smith changes the usage of the parts of the tree. And he goes to the stem of Jesse, the lower part of the tree, and identifies that as Christ. And then in section 113, he identifies essentially himself as the rod. Now, that is unique to Latter-day Saints, that particular interpretation. It works well, and the reason it works well for us as an application of Isaiah 11 is because Christ himself is the great David. Not only is he the son of David, he is the latter day David. If the stem of Jesse is Davidic, that's a reference to Christ sending forth Joseph Smith as a rod to initiate the work of the restoration in the gathering. So it works out perfect,

but turns out that Joseph was creatively applying Isaiah 11. And the context actually is that the stem of Jesse is Davidic lineage and the rod is Christ in context, just the way that the branch is Christ coming out of the roots. So what we have here is a wonderful example of context that is wonderful doctrinally, and then a latter day application or likening unto us that will take something and wrap it around differently to show how from the prophet Joseph Smith we're proceeding as we should. We do that same thing, by the way, with that great Jerusalem temple prophecy in Isaiah

2, right? Because generally the Isaiah 2 prophecy, which talks about the mountain of the house of the Lord and the tops of the mountains and all nations shall flow onto it. And it ends with that couplet out of Zion shall go forth the law and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. What do Latter-day Saints do with that couplet? We divide it. We say out of Zion shall come forth the law. And we apply that to us and our Zion. And then when it says the word of the Lord from Jerusalem, we admit that in a latter day millennial setting, Christ will reign in Jerusalem as well. But the actual couplet there in Isaiah two,

out of Zion shall go forth the law and the word of the Lord out of Jerusalem is saying the same thing twice because Zion is the synonym and actually the name of Jerusalem. Okay. So what we do with Isaiah 2 is we creatively split the parallel, and we apply some of it to us. Are we okay to do that? Absolutely, because that's what Nephi says. Take Isaiah and liken it unto yourselves, that it may be for your profit and learning. But contextually, you can see how all of Isaiah 2

is looking at that great millennial temple in Jerusalem as the headquarters of Christ. And then if we want to split that, that's fine. Works good for us. And we're allowed to do that. But the same is happening in Isaiah 11, where Joseph Smith splits the parallel and will apply stem of Jesse to Christ and rod to himself to emphasize the mission of the latter day restoration. But in context, it's all about Christ.

The rod is Christ and the branch is Christ. And Matthew recognizes that by putting branch right there in Matthew two 23, that's a prophecy of the birth of Christ right there. And Matthew recognized it. And here's the deal. Joseph and Mary must have been extremely disappointed to have moved to Bethlehem, built a house there

because the wise men found him in a house. They intended to live there. But then because of Herod's threat, they had to give everything up, move to Egypt, flee for their lives. And when they wanted to return to Judea to live in the house that Joseph had built, they're told go to Nazareth.

And they must've looked at themselves and said, we went to all that effort to move to Bethlehem so that Mary's son could be known that effort to move to Bethlehem so that Mary's son could be known as born and registered in Bethlehem. And now we're going to have to live in Nazareth. And what Matthew sees is the silver lining in that dark cloud, because the prophets had said he'd be a Nazarene. He would be known from Nazareth. Isn't that amazing? Yeah, that's fantastic. And 700 years before it happens. And the wonderful thing about this is what it's telegraphing to us is the traditional way we've

understood the Christmas story where Joseph and Mary are victims of circumstance, having to go to Bethlehem to pay taxes and, oh, no place to stay. The inns are full, so you have to go to a stable and give birth there and all of these things. And the Roman soldiers, which there weren't, by the way, any Roman soldiers in Judea at the time of the birth of Christ. There were no Roman legions and no Roman soldiers anywhere in Judea or Galilee. Herod had soldiers and he was a Roman client, but there were no Roman soldiers there. And no Romans were pointing their spears at anybody saying, you have to go to the city of your ancestry to pay taxes. Nobody was doing that. We've always understood the story wrong. Joseph and Mary moved to Bethlehem on purpose because they both knew who Mary's son would be.

And they also knew that that son had to be born in Bethlehem. They knew their scriptures. They knew their Hebrew Bible. Yeah. And this is purposeful movement to bring about the prophecy. Having done all of that and even built a house, right? Joseph was a builder. It says he was a carpenter. We naturally think of working with wood and making like furniture

or something. This is not what Joseph did. He was a tecton. He was a tecton. And a tecton means a builder. You can see that the tect root is in architect, it's building. And stuff was built of stone, not wood. They didn't build houses of wood. And besides that, a carpenter who is a builder of wood, when we see Joseph in the art carving chairs, that's a joiner. That's not even a carpenter. There are different English words for these things.

A carpenter is a builder, but techton would be more literally understood in the New Testament context as mason, a stone mason. Joseph was a builder. He knew how to build. And moving to Bethlehem, the first thing they would have done is secure property and build a house. And it wasn't ready by the time Jesus was born because no house is ever ready on time. But it was ready shortly after Jesus was born. And that's where the wise men found them, in the house there in Matthew 2, verse 11.

You've got Old Testament and New Testament you're talking about right now and section 113. So let's add some Book of Mormon. Run the full gamut here, John. Elder Russell M. Nelson wrote a wonderful article called Why This Holy Land? In there, he talks about Nazareth. He talked about just what you talked about, the branch and Netzer and Nazareth. He added this, we read in the Book of Mormon of another interesting connection between branch and Nazareth. Do you remember the reply after Nephi had asked the Lord the meaning of the tree of life?

The Lord then revealed to him a glimpse of the city of Nazareth, where Nephi beheld in a vision a virgin most beautiful and fair. She was destined to become the mother of the Son of God. See 1 Nephi 11. Isn't it interesting that the little town of Nazareth, which name signifies branch, was shown to Nephi in a vision after his inquiry about the tree of life. Yeah. Rather than Bethlehem, Nazareth was shown.

Isn't that amazing? You know, I take a lot of people to Israel and work with a lot of BYU students in Israel. And one of the things I love to do is stop the bus with the students or the tourists on a hill that overlooks the city and look down into Nazareth and quote that first Nephi 11 passage because Nephi beheld the city of Nazareth hundreds of years before it was founded. And he beheld then the virgin in Nazareth. And just to stop there

with a group of students and say, now you behold Nazareth, and let's consider the story of the Savior. All that just from one verse, Jeff. Yeah. And that just shows you the way that we are led. I mean, what a remarkable person we have in the president of the church to see those types of associations and to bring us to this greater understanding of what everything's about, the gathering of Israel, because that's even where

Isaiah 11, starting out with the branch that should come, the Christ, what does it lead to? The gathering of Israel. Yeah. Verse 12, they'll set up an ensign for the nations and shall assemble. I teach at the BYU Salt Lake Center. And when he says, we'll set up an ensign to the nations, and the early saints came in and set up an ensign on Ensign Peak. And I can point out the window and say, that's Ensign Peak right there. It's always kind of fun to go right there. And you can hike up there if you want and see the monument where they set up a literal Ensign to the nations. I actually have to admit, I was a little disappointed to lose the name Ensign for the magazine just because of the greatness of that term in terms of what Isaiah says will happen.

Ensign is a signal flag, if you get to what it really is. The word in Hebrew for ensign is actually nes, which means a signal, but is also the word for miracle, a miraculous signal. Wow. A miraculous signal flag. The Lord will raise a miraculous signal flag, which will institute or initiate the gathering of Israel. And what is that remarkable, miraculous signal flag? Well, of course, it is the work of Christ, but it is in this latter days, it is the restoration. So listen, what if we moved into the Christmas story now? Because I have alluded to a couple of things that probably

listeners and watchers are going, what? That's not how I heard the story. So like Joseph built a house in Bethlehem. Well, how did he do that if they just arrived on the night before Jesus was born? And no, they didn't arrive, at least the way I read the story. They arrived months in advance and it wasn't being forced to go there to pay taxes. They moved there purposefully. So how do we get to that? Well, maybe it's time to go to Luke. Let's do it. We'll start maybe in Luke chapter one, because I think this is really important. After the episode of Gabriel appearing to the father of John the Baptist in the temple,

just for a moment, I think it's worth mentioning that the angel Gabriel appeared in the temple of Herod and gave revelation to a priest, an Aaronic priest, Zacharias. There's so much commentary about the temple of Herod not being a temple of revelation and spiritual things. I don't know if you've seen this around. It's wrong. It's taken from old Protestant commentaries that don't think anything good could be Jewish. All I have to say about the temple of Herod is yes, there was revelation. Yes, there was the power of the spirit. Yes.

Angels appeared in that temple and ministered to the Aaronic priesthood. And yes, Jesus called that temple, his own house and the house of his father. And he loved it. And it was spiritual. It was a holy edifice. I'm so glad you are saying this because I have had that question come up and He loved it, and it was spiritual. It was a holy edifice.

I'm so glad you are saying this because I have had that question come up, and I've wondered myself, if an angel waited for Zacharias to get that assignment and wanted to reveal that in the temple, and if Jesus cleansed the temple throughout the money changers, he reverenced it then. So I'm glad you're saying this. They say, well, it didn't have the holy shekhinah, you know, the dwelling of the Lord. Yes, it did. Jesus made the temple of Herod his headquarters when he was in Jerusalem. He more or less co-opted the place from the Sadducees, which is what made him so mad. Here's the thing, and I think we said this one other time. If you were living 2,000 years ago in the land of Israel, and if you went to Judea at all, and you said, I would like to see Jesus, where would you go to find him?

Absolutely, on any day, he'd be at the temple. And that is a great thing for us to consider now. If you would like to find the Savior, where should you go? Yeah, and where did the apostles go right after Jesus was resurrected and appeared to them? They went back to the temple. They co-opt the temple mountain, make it their headquarters and make the Sadducees mad, but they do. When you get past Zacharias and you get into the story of Mary and Gabriel appears to Mary in Nazareth there in Luke 1 26, you read down and what is the message that Mary receives? Let's go to verse 31. Actually go to 30 because our Catholic friends always quote verse 30. It's the

hail Mary statement. Verse 28, hail thou that are highly favored. It's a beautiful statement. But if you get to verse 31, the angel tells Mary, behold, thou shall conceive in thy womb and bring forth a son and shall call his name Jesus, Yeshua. Yeshua means salvation. And it comes to us in English as Jesus. He shall be great, verse 32, and shall be the son of the highest. And the Lord shall give unto him the throne of his father, David. Now in that verse, in verse 31 and 32, you have three things that Mary now knows, even though she's young, I think she might have been no older than 17, would be an average age when you'd start to be betrothed and get ready for marriage. But first of all, the name is prescribed.

She knows what the name has to be. Jesus, salvation. That's a key. The second is she knows that he will be the son of God, the son of the highest of Elyon in Hebrew. So she knows that this is going to be a different child. And later on, when she asks, how is this going to happen? I have not known a man. The angel says, leave that to God. But the third thing in verse 32, that's very interesting. It says, God shall give unto him the throne of his father, David. Here's David again. Your child, Mary will be the Messiah. The throne

means the king, that this child will be the king from the descent of David. He will be the Messiah promised in Isaiah. So Mary knows those three things from this visitation of Gabriel, that her son would be the savior. His name would be salvation. He would be deity himself, the son of God. And he would also be the Messiah of Israel, the son of David. So now Mary knows this, and she goes to Jerusalem for a while to be with Elizabeth, and then comes back to Nazareth a few months later, and she's fully carrying a child. And by the way, at this point, you skip to Matthew 1, because that's where the story goes back to, when Mary appears with child. So just have to put Luke 1 on hold there for a moment and go back to Matthew and understand that Matthew 1.18, speaking of Joseph, before they came together, she was found with child of the Holy Ghost. And by the way, we understand that Jesus is not the son of the Holy Ghost, but that the way, we understand that Jesus is not the son of the Holy Ghost,

but that the Holy Spirit had been involved in facilitating the father to enable Mary to bear his child. But in verse 19 of Matthew 1, Joseph knows that's not his baby, but Joseph But Joseph loves Mary, does not want to make any public stir about this thing that must be just destroying him. Because when Mary has returned from visiting Elizabeth, she is now a few months along and it's obvious that she's pregnant. What's it like to be a young woman, 17-ish, in a traditional Jewish society in Nazareth, not married, but you're pregnant? How in the world must this have been for Mary? Because what is she supposed to say? God did this? No one can buy that story. And she's engaged, she's betrothed to Joseph. And that means that there was actually a contractual obligation. They were going to be married.

Yeah, I was going to ask you about engagements, Jeff. What is an engagement like in Jesus's day? Well, a betrothal is more formal because you actually have a formal ceremony that announces the betrothal. And that is months before the marriage, up to a year before the marriage. So they already are contractually pre-married at this point, but they have not become married and no union between them would have been proper. So this situation where Mary has gone away to visit Elizabeth and then come back pregnant throws Joseph for a real problematic trouble for him because he knows he's not the father and she's pregnant,

but they have a contract and he must love her dearly. But he also knows it's not his child and he cannot but think that she's been with another man because she's pregnant. So he's now going to cancel the marriage. It says in verse 19, put her away privily, which means he's going to have essentially a divorce of the pre-marriage contract. Yeah, he's going to do it privately. He doesn't want to hurt her, but he himself is so hurt. And as he's considering what he should do, of course, the angel appears to him in a dream. Now catch this, right? In verse 20, Joseph, son of David. Notice how Matthew will emphasize Joseph's Davidic lineage.

And let me just back up here a little bit. Both the genealogies in Matthew and Luke, Matthew 1 and Luke 3, are both Joseph's genealogies. And they both emphasize that Joseph descends from David. Because in his mortal life, Jesus would be known by everybody as the son of Joseph. Even in Luke 2, when Mary speaks to 12-year-old Jesus, who had ditched them to go to the temple for three days, when they finally find him, Mary says to Jesus, Joseph really was a father to Jesus. Now, Joseph didn't father Jesus, but Joseph was Jesus' father for all social situations, which means that Jesus inherits, by virtue of nothing more than

the most basic adoption law, Joseph's Davidic lineage. Some people have tried to make the Luke genealogy in Luke 3 the genealogy of Mary. This is an old Protestant commentary idea because they have to somehow get Jesus to be literally descended from David. And since Jesus is only born of Mary, Protestant scholars thought we'll interpret Luke's chapter three genealogy and make it Mary's. But Luke three specifically says it's the genealogy of Joseph. I'm sure that Mary was descended from David. Lots of people would have been. But the interesting thing about Luke is that it accents that Mary has Aaronic lineage. She's a kinswoman of Elizabeth, who was a daughter of Aaron. So the interesting thing is that Jesus will also have priestly lineage, Aaronic lineage. He's both a king, Davidically, and a priest, Aaronically.

Wow. And being a king priest, he's a priest like unto Melchizedek. So it all works out. But the actual Davidic lineage, which would be necessary through the father to be considered the king of Israel, was the lineage of Joseph from David. And that's what both Matthew in chapter one and Luke in chapter three point out. So Jesus was legitimately the son of Joseph, if adoptively, in terms of the Davidic lineage by which he was recognized as the son of David. But now coming back, so you see in chapter one of Matthew, verse 20 and onward, Joseph being called the son of

David, it goes on to tell Joseph, hey, that woman that you are pre-married to who is pregnant, fear not to take unto thee, marry thy wife. That which is conceived in her is by the power of God, by the Holy Ghost. And she shall bring forth a son, and thou shalt call his name Jesus, for he shall save his people. Yeshua, salvation. Now there, Joseph gets two things. Number one, this son is from God. And number two, the prescribed name. Yeah, that's interesting.

They both get the name. Yeah. And it is said to Joseph, thou shalt call his name Jesus. That's the prerogative of the father. The naming of the son was the prerogative of the father who would preside over the bris, the circumcision. So when we get to Luke 2 and we see that Jesus is circumcised, right, and they call his name Jesus, that's Joseph doing that. He's fulfilling the command he was given. Yeah, thou shalt.

So he is to be the father of that child, even though he didn't father the child. And he is to name that child Jesus. And he is to be that child's father. That makes sense when you look to it, Zacharias and John the Baptist, because he knew his name was supposed to be John, but he couldn't speak at that time. And they want to name him something else. And it says, we have no kin by that name. And then Zacharias writes to them, his name is John. That's his prerogative. And that's when he gets his voice back. Yep. When you do the right things, you get a voice. That's one of the things you learn from that. Now, what is interesting about that, of course, in verse 25 in Matthew 1, is it says that he knew her not, he had no relations with her until she brought forth that firstborn and he called his name Jesus. Joseph names the child. It will be now his child,

even though it's fathered by God. But the point here is that there's one thing that Mary got told that Joseph wasn't told in this revelation. And that's that the child would be the son of David, the Messiah. Now, the interesting thing is that if Joseph's going to raise this child, of course, Joseph's own Davidic lineage would devolve to Jesus just by every right. But in not saying to Joseph, he will be the son of David, the angel isn't telling Joseph the child's going to be the Messiah. He just says that's the son of God. So when Joseph marries Mary, which is what he does in verse 24, it says he arose from sleep and immediately went and said, we're going through with this marriage, which must have surprised his parents, must have surprised Mary's parents, must have surprised the

whole village because they thought this girl's pregnant and she's been gone and she came back pregnant. And when he then agrees to marry her, what must the village have concluded? He must be the father. They've both done what they shouldn't have before their marriage. Can you imagine how difficult it was for this young couple in a traditional society to be thought of by the whole village, even maybe by your parents of having engaged in sexual relations and produced a child before your actual marriage date. And to know both of them, to know that that wasn't the case. And now Joseph will go to Mary and not only marry her, but they certainly must have talked. And Mary must have said, oh my goodness, Joseph, I'm so glad that you know what happened now. And Joseph said, I know what

happened. Everything is great. It'll be fine. But they're the only two who know this. But as they discuss this then, which any young couple will do, Mary must certainly have told Joseph what the angel told her, as well as Joseph would have told Mary what the angel told him. And when Mary tells Joseph that she was told, this child will inherit the throne of David, Joseph now learned something he hadn't learned from the angel. This child that God brought to Mary will be the Messiah. And then Joseph understands exactly what he has to do because Joseph knows the prophecy in Micah 2 that the Messiah must be born in Bethlehem. And that means that that young couple has to move. They have to go to Bethlehem. Their move to Bethlehem was on purpose. The way I read the text, it must have

been months before Jesus was born that they made this decision. And that's where we then go back to Luke 2 and read the story of the move to Bethlehem. I love the idea of them making this decision together, talking through it and saying, we've got to go to Bethlehem. And of taking the situation that's given to you, which is a difficult situation, and saying, we will now make the word of the Lord and the work of the Lord work. We've been given this and we're going to be anxiously engaged in bringing to pass this good work. We've always painted Joseph and Mary, a young couple, as being victims of circumstance. And yeah, the circumstance was that the son of God was going

to be born, but it's not Roman soldiers or taxes that drove them to Bethlehem. It is that they knew who this child was and they knew where it had to be born. When you go now to Luke two, if you understand those dynamics, you can see really what's happening. Because if we go to Luke 2, we now see this. Verse 1 of Luke 2, it came to pass in those days, there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed. And if you look in your very good footnote there, it's not taxed. Enrolled and registered. Enrollment registered. This is not even a census. A lot of more modern New Testament commentaries will say it's a census. It wasn't a census because census taking didn't really happen among the Judean people in the sense that we think of a census where you're actually counting up people in any space.

What this was was a registration. Caesar had decreed that everyone in the empire should be registered. And this registration in verse three was registration in your city. You had to be registered in the city in which you were residing. And this was for everybody. Now, a registration was for all kinds of purposes to know what the population was. So it fulfilled what a census would be, but actually all you had to do is total up the registration to come up with your numbers. We don't register people in the United States. So that's why we have to have a census. We have to count people. So we have to go do it. I served the mission in Europe. And even as a foreigner, I had to register in every city in Germany that I lived in.

And if I moved from Berlin to Hamburg, I had to unregister in Berlin and re-register in Hamburg. And this is an old Roman Empire tradition that prevails through Europe, is registration in your place of residence with the government. That way, the government doesn't have to take a census. They know where you are. They can count you. They know where to tax you, et cetera, et cetera. So registration, good old European registration that goes back from the Holy Roman Empire of the Middle Ages back to the Roman Empire

was what was enforced in Judea and Galilee. So people had to be registered even if they were residents of Nazareth or registered if they were residents of Jerusalem, because that was Caesar Augustus' rule. Now read verse 4 in this regard. Joseph went up from Galilee out of the city of Nazareth into Judea under the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the city of David, which is called Bethlehem because he was of the lineage of David, to be registered with Mary, his espoused wife. They moved to Bethlehem in order to become

registered in Bethlehem, not to pay taxes. The old idea, and this is in all the old, old commentaries that they were forced to be taxed. And that's because of the unfortunate translation in the King James Version that says that apography in Greek means taxed. It doesn't. It means to be written down. It means to be registered. But this old idea that they wanted to be taxed brought about this entire fictitious notion that, oh, Jews were different than everybody else. They had to go to the city of their ancestors to be taxed. And that's why Joseph went to Bethlehem. No such thing existed. Absolutely not. First of all,

that would be the dumbest way to tax people in history. If you had to pay taxes by going 50, a hundred miles to pay the taxes, nobody would do it. Who's going to do that? They just say, oh, I don't live there. I'll just pay taxes here. I'm not going to go to my city. Joseph went with Mary to Bethlehem on purpose to be registered as a resident of that city, which means the decision they made was to live in Bethlehem so that when her child came forth, that child would be known to have been born there and would be registered as having been born there because every newborn would be registered as having been born there because every newborn would be registered as well. Fulfilling the prophecy of Micah.

This is a deliberate thing they did as a young couple. And everybody thinks that Mary is coming to Bethlehem in her ninth month, probably in her fourth or fifth month. That's still not easy to travel, but it's not like we usually tell the story. We usually have her on a donkey and she's just ready to give birth any day. Now, by the way, when you move to a new place back in that age, there wasn't like a robust real estate market where contractors built houses and you went to a neighborhood and said, oh, I'd like that one. Land belonged to families for centuries and people didn't really sell houses readily or build houses on perspective for sale. You were either a longtime resident, or if you were coming as a newcomer, you had to secure land and build a house.

Well, that's undoubtedly what they did. When they arrived in Bethlehem, I think a few months before Jesus was born, they would have immediately looked for land. We know, by the way, from Christian tradition, where Jesus was born at the Church of the Nativity area. I don't know if it's right where that silver star is in the cave underneath the Church of the Nativity, but he was born very probably in a grotto that was there in the region. But that would have been like the way southern outskirts of Bethlehem, because the town center of Bethlehem was somewhat north of where Manger Square is in ancient times. Seems to me that what happened is that Joseph bought land really on kind of the edge of the village, probably land that was agricultural

and maybe a few places were going up there, but bought land because they were going to live there. Jesus was going to grow up in Bethlehem and be known as the Messiah from Bethlehem. So they had to build a house. And what was Joseph's profession? He's a builder. Well, he's a builder. So this is something that he can do. Go to Bethlehem. They become registered there, which means they will be known as residents, which means they have to have a residential place. My assumption is that Joseph took whatever monies he had earned as a builder in Nazareth over years and years and bought a piece of land and began to build a house. And the house is not ready by the time Jesus is to be born that winter.

That's verse seven. So they look around for a guest room because where are they living in the meantime while this house is being born? There are no hotels. Well, they're probably camping. On the land where the Church of the Nativity sits is a cave, and they call it the grotto of the Nativity. And it's an area where there are several caves, by the way. Down the street from the Church of the Nativity is the Milk Grotto Church and other caves. It's a place where there are caves.

Caves are very natural in the hills of Judea. The high probability is that whatever land Joseph acquired had a cave on it, and this would be a natural thing to be. And it's also a perfect place to have a temporary residence while you're building the house, not very far from the cave on the same land. Have you ever seen anybody that lives in a trailer on the land while they build their house? People buy land and then they'll live in a trailer and then they'll build a house or

they live somewhere nearby and they build a house. Well, Joseph and Mary were residing in a grotto. It's a great place to live in a summer. It's a little cooler in the day. In the winter, it's a little warmer. It keeps you dry. I have actually visited Palestinian folks in the Jerusalem region who lived in a cave. They had a refrigerator, a television, couches, partitions in the cave so that they could have a bedroom while their house in

Shimon HaTzadik was being built. I have photographs of it. This is not an unusual thing. So Joseph and Mary are in the way that I kind of reconstruct this, living in the scrotto, building the house, but the house isn't quite done. And when the time comes for Mary to give birth, Joseph seeks a place a little better than the cave. He seeks a guest room somewhere. They call it an inn in verse 7, and he said there wasn't one open. But the word in Greek is kataluma, which means a guest room.

And when they look for a guest room in Bethlehem, there are none available. So she has to give birth in the cave. What's there at the cave? Well, if they've come from Nazareth, they probably have at least one animal. And that animal is going to need a trough. Probably that's one of the first things that Joseph as a stone worker does is he carves out a trough so that his animal can have water. They're the water troughs because the animals will actually graze. There wouldn't have been any hay in the manger. I'm sorry to destroy this story because they didn't grow hay

for animals because grass grows all winter. You've been to Israel, you know what Israel's like in the winter. It's like Ireland, right? It's green, it's lovely. There's no snow covering stuff. They're not harsh winters the way we have here. Animals graze freely all year long, whether it's on the brown grass of summer or the green grass of December, January, February, they're grazing. The trough or manger, the Greek word is fatne, which simply means a trough. It would have been a vusi in Hebrew. This is not a stone box. By the way, I brought the holy family, right? And I brought a little clay stone manger that I did. That's what a manger would look like

right there, except it would be like life size. It would be a stone trough and it was for water because while you could graze your donkeys or your sheep or whatever, they couldn't put their neck down the well to drink. You had to draw water for them and put water in the water trough. So the manger is a stone trough for water. A stone trough for water. Sorry about the hay. Sorry about the song, but that's what it was. And when the babe was born and they needed a safe place for this baby to be, what better place than a little water trough that the blanketed baby could fit in? It's not like one of those wooden things that could easily be knocked over by the donkeyeted baby could fit in. It's not like one of those wooden things that

could easily be knocked over by the donkey. These things are sturdy. Yeah. And you were telling us earlier, how many of those have been found? Hundreds, hundreds. You see them everywhere. Every archaeological site you go to, you see these old stone troughs and they're from biblical times or from medieval times because people have always been doing these out of stone. So probably on their property is a cave and they're living in it. And when Mary has to give birth in that cave, instead of at a guest room somewhere in house, somewhere in the city, they lay the babe in the stone trough. And that becomes the sign that becomes the story in Luke two, because that's what the shepherds are told. You go look for a baby.

Well, there must be a lot of babies in Bethlehem. Well, look for one in a water trough, and that'll be the one. Isn't that an amazing story? I have a friend who has mules and horses, and he also goes to the Holy Land, and he said, boy, the animals chew up wooden stuff. Goats chew on it. Everybody chews on it. You said knock it over. Of course, it would be a stone manger because the wood things don't last very long around animals. So now we love manger scenes. We love them. And I have like 25 of them. Half of them are from the Holy Land. And they all have a stable because we've all imagined that because a manger

is there, because a trough is there, the actual word trough in Hebrew and Fatna in Greek can refer to a trough for feeding or for watering. And because of who we are and because of European and American cold winters, we've always imagined that that trough must have been for feeding. That manger must have been for feeding. Mange actually means feed. We've imagined that there were animals present because there's a manger present. So if there's animals in a manger present, what must it be? It must be a stable. But stable doesn't appear in Luke 2. There's no stable there, nor are any animals mentioned. I assume Joseph maybe had a donkey and maybe they had a goat because those are good for milk, but I don't think there were seven cows and a few dogs. Ox and lamb keeping time.

It's a grotto that they're living in and maybe they have two mangers and one can be used for the babe, but there's no stable. It's a grotto. It's a cave that's being used as a residence. So there are niches that Joseph has probably carved where little oil lamps are burning and there's probably a bed and there's a stove, maybe just inside a small clay stove where you could cook and which would provide some heat, especially in the cooler winter for the cave. And Mary's on the bed and the baby's there in the manger. And that's the very simple picture of what the real nativity scene was like in that grotto. Although in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, the grotto has been paved over

with marble and with tapestries and everything. That's the very simple, realistic nativity scene. One young couple with a newborn child laid in a stone manger in a very simply furnished grotto or cave lit by dim oil lamps on a starry December night in Bethlehem while a house three quarters finished sat a few yards away. The house in which the wise men would find them because by then it had been completed and they'd moved in. Please join us for part two of this podcast.