The fertile hills around Bethlehem hold some of the oldest orchards in the world, but the city was not the bustling one it was presented as in the bible.

Four thousand years ago, farmers began exporting olive oil to the Nile, driving packhorses along the same road that brought the Welsh soldiers from the British base in Egypt. Though the villages around Bethlehem are very old, the actual town was created only some 2300 years ago, at the same time as the Jerusalem aqueduct.

The famous little town exists to guard the reservoirs and, by extension, Jerusalem’s water supply. This means that everyone who has ever conquered Jerusalem, has first seized Bethlehem: Romans, Arabs, Persians, Crusaders, Turks and one hundred years ago this month, a handful of Welshmen.

The few mentions of Bethlehem found in the Old Testament backdate the history of Bethlehem to give it a pedigree it does not possess. When Christ was born, the town was little more than two hundred years old. These bible stories reflect the city in the years prior to Christ’s birth, and include references to the city’s water supply; details of the lives of the shepherds who lived in the surrounding desert; and references to the city gates where goods were sold, and deals were struck.

There are two different versions of Christ’s nativity, recounted in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. It is Luke who tells us about the shepherds. I always picture a child’s nativity play, with my nephew wearing a bathrobe and a tea towel on his head.

Rather than being the helpful shepherds described, the men meeting the holy family were just as likely to fight as make a deal (
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Archive Photos Creative)
The book casts doubt on the depiction of Bethlehem in the Bible's Christmas story (
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iStockphoto)

In reality, shepherds were fearsome men, as happy to start a fight as to make a deal. There was money to be made in sheep, not only from their meat and cheese, but also from the fleeces. The Dead Sea sits at the edge of Bethlehem’s desert, and its noxious waters supply all of the chemicals needed to clean and prepare wool for spinning.

However, life in the desert was hard. The shepherds had to fight to protect their flocks from other tribes. No wonder the townsfolk were nervous when the shepherds came to town. They wanted to make them feel welcome, but not too welcome. In Bethlehem, the shepherds could camp overnight at a caravanserai, the real Biblical inn. This was an orchard where the shepherds could water their animals, buy street food from local vendors, and lay out their bedrolls beneath the almond and olive trees.

The Holy Family meet the shepherds in the caravanserai in Luke’s gospel, because they have nowhere else to stay. There is supposed to be something heart- warming about this story: big tough men are made smushy by meeting a little baby.

There are parallels with the Story of the Good Samaritan, which also appears in the Gospel of Luke; the tough foreigners often turn out to be more friendly than the locals! Running through Luke’s account of the Christ’s life is the idea that here is a message for everyone, because Christ opens his arms to everyone, even enemies, foreigners and dissenters.

The appearance of the shepherds at Christ’s birth reflects the reality of Bethlehem at the dawn of the First Century. The shepherds are likely to have looked like Bedouins, the pirates of the desert, who would wear kohl around their eyes, plait their hair in long braids, and tattoo their faces. On a more symbolic level, the
shepherds remind us that King David also began life as a shepherd. He, too, was once a dangerous outsider, which hints that the child is not coming simply to make friends but to bring change.

One final symbolic meaning often passes us by. In Christ’s day, the very wealthiest sheep and livestock traders were a proto-Arab people called the Idumeans. King Herod’s father, Antipaster the Idumean was, as his name suggests, the leader of the Idumeans. By bringing the shepherds into the story, Luke is reminding us that Herod’s family also made their money out of sheep and wool. The point being that
even Herod’s relatives do not think much of him – they would prefer to see the little baby in the manger crowned king!

Herod was Idumean on his father’s side, which does not mean that he was not Jewish: the Idumeans were Arab-Jews. On his mother’s side, however, Herod was related to another proto-Arab nation called the Nabataeans. These were the greatest merchants of the day, the people who controlled the Spice Route that brought Frankincense, Myrrh, Gold, and every other luxury product to the Roman Empire.

The Nabataeans had the longest and the thinnest Empire the world has ever seen, stretching from Ethiopia all the way through Palestine to the Bay of Naples, but only as wide as a camel route, patrolled by their private security force. The Magi of Matthew’s Gospel story are Nabataeans, exotic foreigners bringing fantastically expensive gifts to anoint the Messiah (the word ‘messiah’ means ‘the anointed one’).

Jerusalem today - 100 years ago Bethlehem was conquered by Welsh forces (
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Anadolu)
Bethlehem was perhaps not the thriving city illustrated (
Image:
Moment RF)

Unfortunately, the Magi had been a little loose of lip, and had told their kinsman Herod why they were visiting Bethlehem. The result, according to the Gospels, was a bloodbath, the Murder of the Innocents, when Herod demanded that every male infant in Bethlehem was killed.

The Holy Family escaped Herod by fleeing south, along the old packhorse route that once carried Bethlehem’s olive oil to Egypt. The Egyptian Orthodox Church preserves stories about the Holy Families adventures along the Nile that are not included in the western Christian Bible (a Bible, incidentally, that was edited and translated in Bethlehem by Saint Jerome: a room said to be his study is preserved in
the church). The road to Egypt is now known as Hebron Road, at least the part that runs through Bethlehem. The Welsh infantrymen who marched along this road a hundred years ago were only a small part of a multinational force called the Egyptian Expeditionary Force, led by the British General Edmund Allenby.

In early December, 1917, Welsh Infantrymen climbed to a pass on the road between Hebron and Jerusalem, just above the little town of Bethlehem. It was a famously bad day. Rain was blowing in blustery gales that seeped into woollen uniforms and cut visibility to yards.

But the Welshmen knew their objective was in sight. In the valley below were three reservoirs, each about the size of an Olympic swimming pool, filled with freshwater drawn from Bethlehem’s springs. The reservoirs fed an aqueduct that supplied all of the water to the city of Jerusalem, six miles further north.

With the reservoirs in British hands, Jerusalem fell the next day. For several hours, Jerusalem’s mayor stumbled around in the rain, waving a white flag and trying to find a British officer who would accept his surrender. The Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, was a Welshman himself and took a particular pleasure in declaring that the conquest of Bethlehem was a gift to the British people.

Allenby’s army was perhaps the most multi-ethnic and multi-faith fighting force assembled since Roman times. The fighters included the ANZAC troops from Australia, Canada and New Zealand, who delighted in posing for photographs at all the Holy sites. There were a large number of Muslim Indians who would later provide the backbone of the Palestinian police. There were two battalions with a Jewish majority, formed from men who had enlisted in England and Canada. Finally, there was the Sharifian Army, named after the Sharif of Mecca, which included several thousand Palestinians who had deserted from the Ottoman Army.

If Bethlehem was a Christmas gift to Britain, it was a gift that depended on a lot of different people. The Palestinian and Jewish soldiers both believed they were fighting for their own homeland, a promise that Britain – perfidious Albion – had managed to make to both sides. The Palestinians dream of a homeland seems as distant today as it has ever been. The city of Bethlehem is surrounded by forty Israeli
settlements, and their presence can make the town feel like a pressure cooker. But Bethlehem’s story rests on the idea that you might find anyone there, and all of them deserve a welcome.

Bethlehem – a biography of a town by Nicholas Blincoe is published in hardback by Constable, and is available from Amazon.