‘She laid him
in a manger . . .’
by Mike Oettle
“THE maiden is with child and will soon give birth to a son whom she will call Immanuel.”[1] When Isaiah spoke these words to King Ahaz he cannot have known that his words referred to anything more unusual than the birth of yet another child to the king. But words of prophecy are not limited by their speaker, for they are given by Divine inspiration. They certainly apply to the child conceived in Miriam (known to us as Mary), the fiancée[2] of Joseph bar Jacob of Nazareth, whom the angel told her to name Jesus.
Matthew, writing for the Jews, was careful not only to quote the Prophets, but also to give Joseph’s family tree (or at any rate mostly his male ancestors) because this established not only Joseph’s but also Matthew’s credibility. Luke, on the other hand, was the collector of stories, the Greek wanting to explain the Jewish way of life to other Greeks.
Luke emphasises the family even more than Matthew does, with his attention to Zechariah and Elizabeth, parents of John, and to Mary’s visit to her cousin Elizabeth – the occasion of Mary’s song so familiar as the Magnificat.[3]
The family is also important in Luke’s account of Jesus’ birth – but in a way
that will not be familiar to you. He writes:
“She gave birth to a son, her first-born. She wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them at the inn.”[4]
This verse has given rise to a whole culture of “poor little Jesus, rejected by the world, born in a stable”. But in fact there is no stable mentioned at all. Hang on, you protest, what about the carol: “Ox and ass before him bow/ and he is in a manger now”? But they’re not mentioned in scripture – the animals were added by Francis of Assisi for his Nativity tableau.
The Greek word translated here as “inn” appears only twice in the New Testament – and the other time it is correctly translated as “guestroom”. Let’s go back to the Old Testament, to 2 Kings 4, where we read that Elisha often visited a couple in Shunem. The woman said to her husband: “Let’s make a small room on the roof and put in it a bed and a table, a chair and a lamp for [Elisha]. Then he can stay there whenever he comes to us.”
By New Testament times it had become normal to provide a guestroom on the roof. In fact, had Joseph gone to an inn when he arrived in Bethlehem, he would never have been able to face his relatives again. It was their right and their duty to provide lodging for him and Mary. But since many people had been obliged to travel to Bethlehem for the census, they would have other guests staying as well, so the guestroom would likely have been a little crowded.
This is where the manger comes in: downstairs the house would be divided into two levels, an upper level for cooking and eating (with the family bedroom off at one side), and a lower level where the animals would be let in at night. Perhaps the family kept a couple of sheep, maybe a cow and a donkey. The sheep and cow would go out during the day with the village herdsmen. The manger, holding fodder for the stock, would be ideal as both bed and bedding for the new-born infant.
And so we see the Saviour of the World, not an outcast in a stable but held in the bosom of His family.
Remember, too, that Jewish men were expected to marry women of their own tribe, so Joseph’s relatives were in all likelihood also Mary’s family. In fact, some commentators believe that the family tree given in Luke’s Gospel is actually Mary’s, since it is so different in the generations between Solomon and Jesus from that in Matthew.
