The Ancients - Bethlehem

Episode Date: December 4, 2022

Most famously known as the birth place of Jesus, Bethlehem has been immortalised in texts, carols, and imagery across history. But prior to the arrival of Jesus and the nativity, Bethlehem had a vibrant, and unexpected history. Located south of Jerusalem in the West Bank, Bethlehem was home to famous figures such as King David and was eventually a favourite spot of Roman Emperor Constantine I. But how do we know about all these figures - and what else is there left to learn?In today's episode, Tristan is joined by Professor Joan Taylor to help illuminate Bethlehem's hidden past. Looking at what the archaeology can tell us about this noteworthy settlement, and helping to separate fact from fiction - Joan offers a new take on this ancient village.For more Ancients content, subscribe to our Ancients newsletter here. If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today!

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's The Entrance on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's podcast, where we're talking all about that central place associated with the Nativity story. The place, the town of Jesus's birth, the town of Bethlehem. We're going to be looking at Bethlehem in ancient

history, what the archaeology and the literature reveals about Bethlehem in ancient history, what we know so far and how much more there is still to learn in the years ahead. Now this was a fascinating chat. I interviewed Professor Joan Taylor from King's College University. Joan dialed all the way in from New Zealand for this chat. I'm so glad we were able to sort of time for it because it's a fascinating story. Bethlehem on one sense how it becomes this place of memory this locus of memory how it becomes so important for more than a thousand years in ancient history from roughly a thousand bc the time of king david down to the time of jesus and then in the early christian period of the roman empire following constantine the first how bethlehem evolves into this significant place of pilgrimage,

of Christian pilgrimage for many pilgrims. Joan explains all and so much more in this brilliant chat and I really do hope you enjoy. So without further ado, to talk all about Bethlehem in antiquity is Joan. is Joan. Joan, it is wonderful to have you back on the podcast. It's wonderful to be back. Thank you for inviting me, Tristan. You're more than welcome, and for this topic as well. And actually, first off, before we delve into Bethlehem, this great topic, I think you've got the record now, Joan, for being the furthest away person in the world from where I'm sitting to do an ancients podcast interview if you are currently in Wellington, New Zealand. So this is wonderful. That's a record in itself. Yes, it's wonderful to have that record.

And then, okay, let's move therefore into the ancient history itself with Bethlehem, an incredible story, particularly at this time of the year. But this is also a settlement that throughout ancient history, is it fair to say, it has this incredibly important locus of memory? that Bethlehem as a place means so much in terms of people know about Bethlehem because of Christmas worldwide. Everyone knows, oh, little town of Bethlehem. Even people who are not Christian, the celebration of Christmas has become quite a global phenomenon. And so Bethlehem of all towns is something that is a town that people will know about. But it has all these different resonances through time as a locus of memory. And that is something that we're definitely going to be delving into during this podcast. But normally on the Entrance, we always start with the background.

And there's never such a thing as a silly question. Because set the scene, whereabouts in the Eastern Mediterranean, in the Holy Land, is Bethlehem? So Bethlehem is just south of Jerusalem. If you visit Jerusalem today, you can get a bus to the modern town of Bethlehem. Today, I have to say, it's a somewhat sad experience to go through the wall and go through the checkpoint into Bethlehem. It's part of the Palestine National Authority. It really shows the issues of the contemporary politics, the stalling of the peace process in Israel-Palestine. When you go to Bethlehem, I don't think you can avoid thinking about the contemporary politics of the place. But in the old days, when I first went to Jerusalem, you could get a bus from Jerusalem to Bethlehem very easily. It's about

eight kilometres south of the old city of Jerusalem. And what about the topography of Bethlehem? What sort of land is Bethlehem built upon as a settlement? So Bethlehem is hilly. That's one thing you notice around Jerusalem. It's a hilly environment. You're quite high up. And Jerusalem is built on a hill. Bethlehem is built on a hill, or two hills, really. It's two hills fused together. And the old town of Bethlehem was spread out. It's sort of an L-shaped hill. And the old town of Bethlehem was spread out on the lower bar of the L. But over time, people lived either more on the upright part of the L or the lower part of the L. And now it's spread out, of course,

all over the surrounding countryside and into the valleys and onto many other hills. But the core of the old part of Bethlehem is this L-shaped hill. This is L-shaped hill. And as we'll delve into later in this podcast episode, because we'll be talking quite a bit about tombs at Bethlehem but with rock cut tombs in particular in antiquity is this where we would find many of these tombs in the hill itself in the rock cut well in the hill as rock cut tombs or would we find these tombs elsewhere? Well the way people buried in antiquity and we're talking about different phases, they would look to put their dead in caves in the valleys around the hills. So the villagers would be on the hill, say, let's move back,

back in time and situate ourselves at a particular time zone and go to the Iron Age. So the Iron Age, we're talking about, say, 1000 BCE. You would stand on top of this hill, this L-shaped hill where your village was, and look down into valleys where you would bury your dead in various caves around the village. And there would be all sorts of rituals to do with the dead. These are also places of memory. So if we think about the village as a place of memory where things happened, but also the tombs are places where important people were buried. And you'd think about their memory when you went to visit their tombs.

Right. So that's so interesting. It's almost like with ancient Egypt, you have that land of the living and the land of the dead, almost that separation there with Bethlehem and the valleys too. I mean, Joan, okay, well, you mentioned 1000 BC there. So if we want to learn more about this early stage in Bethlehem's history, what types of sources do we have available for trying to learn more about Bethlehem at this particular time, let's say, just as an example, in its distant history? So it's the Bible, it's scripture. And what happens is we see in scripture that Bethlehem keeps on getting mentioned. It was a site of memory for all sorts of different characters that appear throughout the Bible. And the most important character of all, of course, is the great King David, who hails from Bethlehem, son

of Jesse from Bethlehem, and becomes the great king who rules Jerusalem, who establishes Jerusalem, builds his palace there, and unites the 12 tribes of Israel into one kingdom, the kingdom of David that stretches through Israel and Judah. Jerusalem is the heart then of the tribe of Judah from which David came. So David's memory is very, very specially stamped on Bethlehem. And it seems like we have so many Bethlehemites in the Bible because they are somehow associated with this town, associated with the story of David and his ancestors like Ruth and Boaz in the book of Ruth. So Bethlehem is surprisingly frequently mentioned for a small village in the Bible because of David. That's so interesting. And also, I guess, if we keep on the Bible for a bit longer, and particularly the Old Testament, because I also noticed something in the sources, which was really interesting in how that there's this ancient idea of Bethlehem also being a

person. This sounds very weird, but what exactly is this, Joan? a person. This sounds very weird, but what exactly is this, Joan? Well, yes, in terms of the genealogies of the Old Testament, sometimes the idea is that it's sort of connected with almost what we would interpret as an indigenous way of seeing landscape now, that your identity as a people, as a town, as a village, is also a personality. Now, here I am in Wellington in New Zealand, and one of the things that is striking about Maori way of seeing landscape is that you can actually attribute personality to landscape, like Mount Taranaki is also a personality.

And there's this one genealogy in the Bible in which the different towns of Judah are actually also ancestors. And so you trace your genealogy through the towns. And that connection between land and people is something I think in modern Western societies we have lost. But it is a traditional sense of your connectivity with land. You are invested in that land and you're invested in your place. So therefore, if we move on to alongside the literature, and let's focus then on the early story of Bethlehem with David, alongside the mentions of David in the Old Testament. Do we have much archaeology surviving that can shed more light on what Bethlehem looks like, for instance, at around the time that we believe King David was living?

It's really tricky and so interesting that what we should be discovering is a whole lot of tombs in the valleys around Bethlehem. But actually, there hasn't been that much archaeology done in Bethlehem because of the political situation. Unlike in Jerusalem or other parts of Israel-Palestine, it sort of remains underexplored. And when tombs are found, they're found really as part of construction works. You know, people think, okay, I'm going to construct a new building, I better check what's there. And then they will discover a tomb. There have been some really good surveys done by Italian archaeologist Lorenzo Negro, who works with the Palestine National Authority and has been trying to track where these tombs are.

And they found tombs all around the vicinity of Bethlehem, stemming from the Bronze and Iron Age. They have found these east of Bethlehem in times past. There's one quite close to the northern edge of the hill that's also further away. But they have clearly been reused and reused and reused in later periods. And so we don't have some sort of lovely Tutankhamen-like excavation of a tomb outside the village of Bethlehem that's going to show us the line of David or anything like that. It's more trying to see what remains of these ancient tombs that have been reused at later times.

I mean, that is really, well, it's extraordinary in itself, as you mentioned, because of the political situation. So to clarify, therefore, at this time, you mentioned because of the political situation so to clarify therefore at this time you mentioned bronze age and iron age so i'm guessing we're talking the start of the first millennium bc in that part of the world that the archaeological evidence that we do have is quite limited as you say to tombs that i'm guessing we don't as of yet have much evidence for houses potentially for the the actual size of Bethlehem at that time, maybe water. I've got my note cisterns here. Do we know anything potentially about that? Right. One of the most interesting things that was discovered in Bethlehem over a hundred years ago was some remains around what were traditionally the Wells of David. They were called the Wells

of David. And one of those things about traditional designations is you think, well, could they be true or they're just invented out of nothing? And a lot of things are invented out of nothing in the area of Bethlehem, including the place that the star fell and just the Wells of David when the Franciscans excavated them. And they're located just in the northern part at the top of the L of the hill. They discovered some Iron Age remains, some Iron Age pottery around these wells. And in fact, that kind of well there dug into the rock in a particular way that fits with the shape of Iron Age systems we know from the rest of the area. This was a feature of the Iron Age that they built these dugout wells in hilltop settlements.

So it would make sense that it could be wells that are associated in the Bible with David. There's a particular story where David is close to a gate. There's an issue with the Philistines. There's a question about whether or not he's going to deal with the Philistines. And there's this mention of these particular wells. So if it could be proven that it's close to a gate, particular wells. So if it could be proven that it's close to a gate, then they would actually be the genuine wells mentioned in the Bible about the story of David. And indeed, what happened was that the Franciscans then found a church that would have been built in the 4th century, remains of church built in the 4th century. And in the mosaic inscription of this church, it mentions a gate nearby in terms of an inscription alluding to a gate. So the Franciscans got very excited about this and said,

well, look, that shows that at least in the fourth century, they associated these wells with a gate. But we have not found the gate. An Iron Age gate would be a wonderful thing to find in Bethlehem, but that would mean actually digging an area that is very much a built-up area of present-day Bethlehem. And I don't think that's going to be happening anytime soon. Probably not, but we're going to do the best we can at the moment anyway. And it's fascinating that mixing of literature and archaeology, as you've mentioned just there, Joan, with the gate and the spring and the cistern. But if we go back to the Iron Age and following the time of David, actually one more question on David quickly, and I think this is something that we'll be coming back to later. And this is all about David, where he was buried. Now,

do the sources say that he was buried in Bethlehem? I find it really intriguing. There's one of these things where the Bible says he was buried in the city of David with his ancestors. But traditionally, in terms of a locus of memory, that is understood to be Jerusalem because David built the city of David in Jerusalem. He established his place in Jerusalem. And later on, in terms of the records of the burials of the kings of Judah, they seem to be buried outside Jerusalem, or maybe not, but there's this kind of idea that they're buried outside Jerusalem. However, because it says he was buried with his ancestors in the city of David, that cannot be Jerusalem. It should be Bethlehem. And while biblical scholars might think, okay, all the

kings of Judah should be buried in their locus of power outside Jerusalem, the Byzantine Christians really strongly believe the kings of Judah were buried outside Bethlehem. For centuries, Christians would go to a tomb which they identified as the tomb of David, the tomb of the kings of Judah. Byzantine Christians even mentioned Hebrew inscriptions that proved the point that they were buried there. So I guess a question is, where were the royal tombs of Judah? Were they actually outside Jerusalem in one of the valleys located just on the edge of Jerusalem? Or were they in fact outside the village of Bethlehem? If we have these Byzantine writers talking about seeing the supposed tomb of David so many centuries later, if they pinpoint potentially the location in one of the valleys or give a rough idea, have there been attempts by archaeologists to try and locate the supposed tomb of David somewhere outside of Bethlehem? No. I think everyone does think, well, the royal tomb should be outside Jerusalem. And Josephus has this incredible story about King Herod, naughty King Herod, who features in our Christmas story. Before he was naughty apropos Jesus, he was naughty apropos David,

in that he went into what was remembered in the first century BCE as the tomb of David just outside Jerusalem and basically desecrated it. He went hunting for treasure, again, thinking Tutankhamen tomb-like structure. He would go in and he would get the treasure out. I think he didn't find any, but he also sought the tomb of David and Solomon there and didn't find that either. So, in the first century BCE, there was a memory of the tomb of David being in Jerusalem, but whether or not that is actually a genuine memory of where it was located, that remains to be seen. But Herod certainly thought that's where it was located. That remains to be seen. But Herod certainly thought that's where it was located. But this question of whether or not we can locate the tombs,

if we did a survey, if we did a really good investigation of what the tombs were in the region around Bethlehem, all the valleys around Bethlehem, it might give a clearer idea at least what was going on in terms of burial activity in the Iron Age, but that work is still to be done. Well, I thought I had to ask, I had to ask because of what you mentioned earlier there, Joan, but it's really interesting to hear with the whole figure of David. But I'd like to now go back to this idea of Bethlehem as this important locus of memory, which I know you find so fascinating. So if we go to the first millennium

BC post David but before the time of Jesus I mean does Bethlehem retain importance? I know it's such a huge period but do you think it retains importance in this millennia and if it does why does it retain its importance during these many hundreds of years? Right. I think it is this memory of David. David is such an important figure and actually is an important figure today for a lot of people. He's the model king. He's supposed to be the author of many of the Psalms, which are extraordinarily beautiful compositions in the Bible. He's a very flawed character, and that's a very attractive character in a way, because we're all flawed. And so following him is not just following a hero who has become a great king. And his story is so Game of Thrones. He's just one of these characters you want to know more about. He's got good, he's got

bad, he struggles, he goes from rags to riches. It's that kind of story. But that memory of David lives on because there's an understanding that someone of his line is actually going to become a new king in Israel, however one conceptualizes that king. So this king, the idea of the king is that they are anointed as part of their coronation ceremony. And that word anointed in Hebrew is Mashiach or in Greek Christos. So you get the idea of this future king from the line of David who will arise and lead Israel, the whole of Israel, anew. So this idea of this expectation of this new king is then associated with the village of Bethlehem, which is the town of David. And this is the prophecy in the book of Micah, if I'm not mistaken.

of David. And this is the prophecy in the book of Micah, if I'm not mistaken. Exactly, Micah 5, as the new king is going to arise in Bethlehem. So there's this place of expectation. And we know from the records of those who returned from the captivity in Babylon, that in the 6th century BC, that there were Bethlehemites that came back into Judah and then resettled in Bethlehem. So there's the continuity with what went before and they would have established themselves anew. Right. So these are the supposed descendants of David that are also highlighted in the tombs that are mentioned later, I'm presuming. Yes. So the question is, because Davidic descent is so important, there's a whole massive range of prophecies associated with this idea of a new king arising in Israel, and it's from the line of David.

Far-ranging prophets are all predicting this one thing. If you're of the line of David, it's not nothing. It's not like, oh yeah, David was my ancestor. Isn't that cool? It's a sense that you belong to a line that has a promise attached to it, and it would be important to you. And again, in New Zealand, in Aotearoa New Zealand, learning from Maori about what genealogy means, it's so much part of your identity. You recite your genealogy. You recite your whakapapa on a marae, a meeting place. And it was something that would have been known to you. You would grow up being able to recite it.

And the tombs of your ancestors lying down there in the valley would be very important to you, even if it wasn't the royal kings of Judah who were buried in the valleys around Bethlehem. It was people who could trace their ancestry to David because this was a Davidic town. Hello, I'm James Rogers and over on the History Hit Warfare podcast, I bring you cutting edge military histories from around the world. Why was Sitting Bull such a remarkable leader? What was Napoleon's greatest ever battle? How did the Cuban Missile Crisis almost turn the Cold War hot? And who

dropped the world's largest nuclear bomb on the Arctic? Through interviews with world-leading historians, policy experts, and the veterans who served, we find the answers to these questions and so much more. So come and join us on the History Hit Warfare podcast, where we're on the front lines of military history. it's very very cool indeed and you know that line of David as you've highlighted there and I guess one other thing I'd love to ask about that is in regards to before we get to the time of Jesus itself obviously this is the Hellenistic period and recently we chatted to well some time ago now I chatted to Jodie Magnus about burial at the time of Jesus and before with things words such as osciaries and the like I mean archaeology from

tombs near Bethlehem at this time if there has been much done or there has been much discovered have there been any maybe hellenistic style tombs or parts of tombs from nearby bethlehem which might date to this pre jesus time but post david time in the first millennium bc no not really i wish i wish there would be something i have to say that my colleague, Shimon Gibson, who has worked with the Armenian Patriarchate on a particular zone that they were excavating in the Hall of Jerome in the Armenian Monastery, discovered a small piece of an ossuary there. So it's clear that there were ossuaries in the region and Roman period tombs, but where exactly? Frankly, the area underneath the present day Church of the Nativity might very well have been a burial ground at the time of Jesus,

because by that time the village had shrunk quite considerably. because by that time the village had shrunk quite considerably and it's not clear exactly where its centre was, but it's probably more at the corner of the L in terms of the hill. So that eastern arm of the L, the lower part of the L, was unoccupied. And it's clear from archaeology there that there were massive cave systems. Wherever you go down in the archaeology, you find these cave systems, and that's been clear for a long time under the Church of the Nativity. And if you've got cave systems that date from the Hellenistic and Roman

period, as an archaeologist, you think, okay, some kind of tomb system would make sense. I say this unknowing that it's incredibly controversial to say that underneath the Church of the Nativity, there could have been Hellenistic Roman tombs. They were much, much used in the Byzantine period. So everything that was originally in them would have been completely taken out and there was nothing left really of that time. Well, there you go. You mentioned the Church of the nativity. We were going to get there. We're going to get to Constantine, but let's focus on the time of Jesus now. And I think you hinted at it there, Joan. Bethlehem, although it remains this special place in the eyes of the people

at the time of Jesus, the size of the settlement at that time, do we think it's smaller than it had been in the past? Probably. Again, we're stuck with not really having done enough archaeology in the area of Bethlehem. And I know people have been making these soundings in different places over time, but we don't know the edges very well. I think just from hearsay, and I better not say too much, that there have been ad hoc finds that show that the town of Bethlehem in the Roman period was a village, but it wasn't a tiny, tiny little village. These finds are spread out over a reasonable area, but it wasn't the extent of the Iron Age town of Bethlehem. If you think about the Iron Age town really being the whole of the L, we're talking at different times of some shrinkage within that L shape. And go on then, we've highlighted it already. Why therefore, with this special nature of Bethlehem, this locus of memory,

is it so important that Jesus is buried in this particular village? Jesus was born in this particular town because of Micah, this prediction that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem, that this was one of the essential features of the Messiah. So in the Gospels, there's even a question, you know, was he really born in Bethlehem? the Gospels, there's even a question, you know, was he really born in Bethlehem? And I think some scholars have questioned whether or not that actually means he was born in Nazareth and everyone tried to fudge it. And all of these stories about Jesus being born in Bethlehem were really trying to insist that he was born there when he wasn't. There's a lot of skepticism among historical Jesus scholars about whether or not Jesus was actually born in Bethlehem. But it was so important in terms of the prediction. And I really think that

some of the things that scholars make much of that indicate that he wasn't born in Bethlehem are actually a kind of irony. So, for example, in the Gospel of John, when Philip comes to Nathanael and says that they've found Jesus, wonderful, wonderful, he could be the Messiah, and he's from Nazareth, and Nathanael says, what good could come out of Nazareth? He's not born in Bethlehem, essentially. And that's really an indication of a kind of ignorance, because the whole of the Gospel of John is based on this interplay between light and dark, truth and falsehood, knowledge and ignorance. At various points in the Gospel, people say ignorant things. So I think it's pointing to the fact that, aha, we as Gospel readers, we as this community know that Jesus was born in Bethlehem. And we

don't need to answer Nathaniel because we know in terms of our readership. I feel like the story that we've got in both Matthew and Luke that Jesus was born in Bethlehem is quite cool. That is an identity marker of him. And people would have expected that in terms of his messiahship. But it is an essential feature because you can't fudge Micah. You've got to fulfill that. I mean, absolutely. And I will ask about King Herod in a second and what his thoughts are potentially around that with a site nearby. potentially around that with a site nearby but just before we go to that there's another part of the nativity story that is that we'll probably all know of from nativity performances it's not

the sheep it's not the shepherds of course they're the wise men too but it's the star of bethlehem now joan with the star of bethlehem are there any theories as to what could have been the star of Bethlehem, are there any theories as to what could have been the star of Bethlehem? Right. There's multiple astronomical theories about what the star of Bethlehem might have been. And I'm not the expert on the astronomy, but I have sat in various panels where astronomers have speculated about what the star could have been. Since there are these various possibilities, I think that it's a memory. Again, we're talking about memory. It's a memory of some kind of astronomical event. I think it's David Hughes who's talked about the triple conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn and the constellation of Pisces that would have made a very, very bright star for a period and it would have moved around

because we're talking about something that moves. So it's a planet essentially that was understood as a very bright star. So some kind of conjunction of planets would make sense. And I'm not an astronomer and I do not understand astronomy about what actually took place, but it's also something that was visible to astronomers. It would have been visible to the naked eye, people looking up going, golly, that's a bright star. But the astronomers would have made sense of it and interpreted it. And what we've got is the story in Matthew in which these magoi, that we call magi, magoi is just from the plural of the word

Magus, Magos, which just means a sort of magician or an expert in some sort of special field like astronomy. And the Magoi, the Magi come with an announcement that they have been following the star and they understand the star. And everyone is really surprised in Jerusalem. The whole of Jerusalem is astonished and confused. So it's not something that was immediately apparent in terms of its interpretation to everyone. It requires some sort of specialist knowledge. So we've got to think of an astronomical event that isn't just a comet going across the sky, but requires interpretation. How interesting. Well, there you go. I love that astronomy part of that. So many ancient stories too, and the fascinating

one with the Star of Bethlehem. I mean, we've got to keep moving on. I said we talk about King Herod, and we've got to talk about King Herod, you know, villain of the nativity story, fascinating historical figure, this great builder that he was. But if we go back to this key idea of Bethlehem having this special importance, this locus of memory at the time of Jesus, what do we think Herod thinks of Bethlehem, given its importance to so many of his subjects? There was something about Bethlehem, the expectation of the king arriving in Bethlehem. That was really bad news for Herod. Herod is, again, one of these, like David in a way, Game of Thrones characters, but a baddie. Someone you'd want to see die horribly at the end of the

series. And in fact, the record of his death, he does die horribly, according to Josephus. He was put in place by the Romans. He was their chosen client king of Roman Judea. He wasn't Davidic. He wasn't priestly. He wasn't even fully Judean, Jewish. His mother was Nabataean from the Arab kingdom of Nabataea, and his father was a convert to Judaism from Idumea. So his credentials as a king were always suspect in terms of his population, and he knew it. He was extremely paranoid about being a king. He relied on his benefactor, Augustus, the Emperor Augustus. And he killed two of, well, in the end, three of his sons for their threat to his throne, even quite late in his rule.

He murdered people right, left and centre if they show any kind of late in his rule. He murdered people right, left, and center if they show any kind of threat to his power. And he constructed very, very close to Bethlehem, this extraordinary palace fortress called Herodion, where he placed his own tomb. where he placed his own tomb. He had his tomb built quite early on, and it was a gigantic structure, about 25 meters in height, built of white stone, pointing up from the side of Herodion. And even now, if you stand in Bethlehem, on a rooftop of Bethlehem, and look out to Herodion, you can see the reconstruction of Herod's tomb, which is a fifth of the height of the original tomb, just on the edge. So it's like this great finger pointing, it would have been this finger pointing up and like a beacon just for everyone in Bethlehem to see.

It was like, I am watching you, Bethlehem. I am building my tomb right close to you, people who think you are the legitimate rulers of Judah. Well, that begs the big question then, Joan, as to why he therefore decides to build this monumental tomb, not in Bethlehem and his palace as well, but so close by, within the visual distance of Bethlehem. Why does he do it? Well, there's, again, it's a really interesting story in Josephus where he talks about when Herod was first established in Judea, he was supposed to be the rightful ruler, but there was actually a civil war going on and there was another ruler that was supported by the Parthians, Metatius Antigonus. The Parthians came in in 40 BCE and took over Jerusalem, and Herod had to flee with his family. He took the road to heading

south and then east. He took the road south and he passed by Bethlehem. Josephus doesn't say he passed by Bethlehem. I should sort of say that, but he passed by this area, and he was attacked by Judeans, not Parthians, but local Judeans who hated him. And he successfully slaughtered all of these local Judeans who were out in the middle of the night trying to attack him. And on the site where he slaughtered them, he said he built, the memory is that he built his site of Herodion right there to commemorate his slaughter of local Judeans very, very close to Bethlehem. So it was a way of saying, I am victorious. But what I think is very interesting is that these local Judeans would have come from the area of Bethlehem and attacked him, and then he slaughtered

them. So there's something very intriguing in terms of the memory then of what we have in the Gospel of Matthew of the slaughter of the innocents, the slaughter of the children of Bethlehem by Herod the Great. It almost seems as if that story of the massacre of the innocents, I guess it may be in one way, forgive me if you think my language is wrong here, but it's unsurprising that Herod becomes the big villain of this Bible story because of the actions, the historical actions of his life and the imposing nature of creating such a monumental building, you know, supposed to show his great legacy within visual distance of Bethlehem. Bethlehem and Herod, these are two names that don't get on well. Exactly. And in fact, Jodie Magnus, you mentioned Jodie, she's written a very good article about

the tomb of Herod being a kind of statement in terms of his kingship. It must have something to do with Bethlehem. It must have something to do with Bethlehem, given it's directed in the direction of Bethlehem. The Gospel of Matthew presupposes a knowledge that we all hate Herod, which I think is really interesting because the moment you hit Herod in the Gospel of Matthew and he's troubled by the Magi arriving, you know, without reading the rest of the story, that something bad is going to happen. And when he says to the Magi, oh, go and worship this new king when you find him, tell me where he is, come back and let me know how it goes, you know they shouldn't go back and tell Herod. And in the story of Matthew, they are told in a dream, don't go back and tell Herod. And in the story of Matthew, they are told in a dream,

don't go back and tell Herod anything, and they proceed back home. And you think, good, you haven't told Herod. But it presupposes this knowledge. Again, you're talking about memory. Because we know from that story already when we read it that Herod is bad news, we approach that story with when we read it that Herod is bad news. We approach that story with this pre-existing knowledge, but someone who read it for the first time, it's expected that they also have this knowledge that Herod was trouble and was going to do something terrible.

It's very interesting. I'm glad you mentioned Jodie Magnus there, a good old friend, a force of nature who was on the podcast last year, and she talked all about the tomb of Herod and this link to bethlehem which is fascinating but i'm so glad we also talked about it there joan i mean come on we've got to move on obviously the focus of this podcast episode is bethlehem so post the time of jesus when bethlehem is in roman control i mean how does bethlehem fare if we do have more archaeology from this time and literary sources in the time of Greco-Roman historians? Do we know how Bethlehem fares in the centuries following, you know, in the first few centuries A.D. or C.E.? I mean, this is an area which is very, very unstable. There's been so many terrible things that have happened over time.

In the middle of the second century, there was a revolt, the Bar Kokhba revolt. And in 136, it was horrifically quashed by the Romans who engaged in what we would now call ethnic cleansing. And they removed Jews from Jerusalem and all the surrounding area and terrible, terrible loss of life. And a population that was not Jewish, Judean, settled in Bethlehem. And we know from Christian sources that they then established a cult of Tammuz Adonis, the god, a dying and rising god, in fact, Tammuz Adonis, that is linked up with Navatea and wider Syria. And that cult was established in the cave that then became, in due course, the Nativity. So, Origen, in the third century, talks about a cave in Bethlehem where Jesus was being remembered. but we know also from other Christian sources that this was a cave

where they were worshipping Tamar's Adonis. So it seems like there was a kind of syncretistic cult in which, you know, choose your God that you're going to worship in this cave, and Christians understood that this was a sacred place of Jesus. Right, because actually linking into this story, I've got in my notes another key figure, which is Eusebius of Caesarea, who seems to be one of these Christian sources. And I know because how does he therefore link into this quite interesting time when trying to figure out the population of Bethlehem at that time? And I guess, you know, what cult was, maybe cult's the wrong word, but what was most important for the memory of the particular population at that time?

I think it is tricky because even if you've got in the second century Jews being removed from Bethlehem, there's certainly archaeology that has been found around the tomb of Rachel that indicates that Jews came back into the area. There are some likely Jewish tombs from the third century that then are overlaid by a Roman military occupation around the tomb of Rachel. And that is a very, very interesting site in itself. So we don't have enough in terms of archaeology to say what population groups were situated actually in Bethlehem through those centuries. But it's likely that there are Jews in the area anyway who would remember certain places like, for example, Davidic tombs in the area. And it's likely that there are Christians in Jerusalem who would want to know about where Jesus was born and would try and situate it in a particular place and would visit.

So we might have a combination of ethnicities and religious devotions. And we can have these combinations quite happily at different times in the area of Israel-Palestine. It's not as if you necessarily have a Christian village or a Jewish village or a pagan village or a Muslim village. You can have people who are of different religious traditions living in the same place. And in fact, Bethlehem has been quite a model of that for many centuries up until the present day. So you mentioned that importance of memory, it remains even with these different populations in the early centuries AD and going on from there, because as we go on a bit further to the time of Constantine in the early fourth century, now you hinted at the building earlier,

which I know, no doubt, you know, we're probably going to be talking about now. But how does Constantine, how does he affect Bethlehem? Well, Constantine was not in the least bit interested in maintaining a nice kind of balance of different religious and ethnic groups. He wanted everything to be Christian. He wanted to stamp Christianity and create the idea of the Holy Land, create Christian pilgrimage, create an empire that was strongly Christian. So Constantine was the great benefactor of Christianity and wanted to promote the place that had been identified as the birthplace of Jesus in this cave. I mean, I have to say, you know, the cave complex, we don't know what the cave complex was being used for. Some of it could have been burial places, but some of it may have

been also an area where people kept animals, stables, for all we know, because we can have complex uses of caves in the Roman period. So I'm not saying that, I better be careful, I'm not saying that the place where Jesus was born traditionally was a burial place, but it's certainly associated with caves that could have been understood as burial places. It was taken over as a sacred place for the birth of Tammuz Adonis. Constantine comes in and builds this massive basilica. So by 339, I think it is it was dedicated to Mary the birthplace of Christ and huge numbers of Christian pilgrims then start flocking to the holy land flocking to Bethlehem and coming to recall as a site of memory the birthplace of Jesus.

Right. So although there's potential evidence for Bethlehem being a place of pilgrimage before this time, it really goes to another level, its importance, the amount of people who come to this site. It really does seem like it very much increases following Constantine and when Christianity really starts taking a hold of the later Roman Empire. Yes, it's a real boom time for Christian pilgrim, Christian tourism. This is the first, you know, massive tourist industry to have all the pilgrims arrive. I think the people who came there before were more like Eusebius, more like scholars who wanted to find out about places, origin and Eusebius. But now it was a place of devotion. Now it was a place where people gathered, sung hymns, prayed, took trinkets for their memory, you know, tourist items,

stayed, ate in these hotels, you know, pilgrim hostels. And it became a place then when, you know, Bethlehem boomed at the time of the Byzantine period. And under the Peace Centre in Jerusalem, they discovered a massive Byzantine building. There might have been a place where the pilgrims stayed. This was now a site all around the eastern side of Bethlehem. The extension of that L now becomes a main locus of Christianity. It's a huge centre of devotion. Huge centre of devotion indeed. Well, Joan, it's absolutely fascinating. It seems we've covered so many hundreds of years of history. Actually, one last thing before we completely wrap up,

because you mentioned a particular tomb and I'd like to ask a bit more about it. It just really struck out to me, the tomb of Rachel. What is this, the tomb of Rachel? of Rachel. What is this, the tomb of Rachel? Right. So the great patriarchs and matriarchs of Israel. Rachel was supposed to be buried just outside Bethlehem and not with the rest of the patriarchs and matriarchs in Hebron, but just outside the Bethlehem. And that site, when it's mentioned in Genesis, they talk about, you know, a pillar that is visible to this day, which I think is just amazing. The Genesis writers have a sense of their own location and time, but we don't know what that location and time actually is. But it was a locus of memory where people would just remember Rachel and her legacy as the foremother of Israel, of Judah. And so this idea that we've got these important tombs that dot around the landscape that people came to and remembered,

I think is important in terms of any people that you're... I think what happens in scholarship is we tend to see texts. We see texts as things that are literary and we think about the meaning of these texts. We think about why the author might have written about a particular place in a particular way. But if we situate ourselves in the place, if we actually go to a place, these literary texts become alive when we realize that the landscape itself is alive in terms of memory and stories would have been told in that landscape that then get recorded in our texts but we have to remember that they're really tied to place and those places are tremendously important to this day i mean it is fascinating and bethlehem, this has been a podcast, unlike many others I've done, you know, over the past couple of years about particular settlements in

the ancient world, whether it's Rome or any others, or London and so on and so forth, where there's been such a prime focus on the archaeology. But I know that's partly because of the, I mean, it's quite a tumultuous part of the world at the moment, Bethlehem, as we the start but I actually I think for this chat it's been very nice to focus largely on the literature because as you've just highlighted there there doesn't seem to be many other places in the world which have such a significant as you mentioned this idea of memory attached to it and almost you can follow that memory you know for more than a thousand years and how it has influenced the development of one of the most if not the most significant religion that has emerged in human history absolutely and i do think it's important to remember that for

muslims as well the birthplace of the Prophet Isa is important. And for many, many centuries, Muslims would also go and honour the birthplace of Jesus in the Church of the Nativity, and they had a special passage in to the Church of the Nativity. So it can be a very unifying thing. Absolutely, indeed. That's a lovely comment to leave this on. Joan, this has been wonderful, as mentioned, and you've been on the podcast once before. You've written several books. You are a scholar, a legend in this area of ancient history. And one of your most recent books is also to do with the time of Jesus, but the women surrounding these figures. do with the time of Jesus, but the women surrounding these figures.

Yes. So I wrote a book with Helen Bond, Women Remembered. It's about women disciples, and that's also about memory, how they were remembered, how they were presented. So yes, memory is very important, how we remember things and how we locate things. Absolutely. Well, Joan, it just goes for me to say, thank you so much for dialing in from the other end of the world today. And it's been a pleasure to have you on the podcast. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you. Well, there you go. There was Professor Joan Taylor giving you an overview of Bethlehem in antiquity, what we know so far, and how this this place it was such an important locus of memory a place of memory for people for more than a thousand years even in ancient history it was a wonderful chat and i

really do hope you enjoyed it now last things from me you'll know probably what i'm going to say if you enjoy the ancients podcast episodes if you want to help us out one thing that you can do as we continue our mission and we always continue our mission to spread these incredible stories from our distant past with as many people as possible to share the expertise of people like Joan and all these other incredible academic experts who devoted years of their life to research in particular areas of ancient history if you want to help us in our mission where you can do one very simple, very easy thing, just leave us a lovely rating on Spotify, on Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts from. It really helps us as we continue to grow this podcast,

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