[Much of the material in this document clearly
derives from and/or is inspired by the writings of Kenneth Bailey. In particular
see Kenneth E. Bailey, “The Manger and the Inn: The Cultural Background of
Luke 2:7”, ERT 4/2 (1980), pp.201-217, as well as his online chapter "The
Story of Jesus’ Birth" at
http://www.ivpress.com/title/exc/2568-1.pdf]
You will recall my earlier discussion of the way culture affects interpretation, and I said that one example is Luke 2:7. Let’s now take a look at the cultural background to this verse. In the NIV translation of the Bible, this verse is translated as follows: “and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn”. There are some elements that are immediately striking for us culturally – such as the fact that the baby is wrapped in cloths, in ‘swaddling clothes’. This is still practiced in many eastern countries (including Romania, where I lived for three years). If you go to the East, you will find that newborn babies tend to do a pretty good imitation of stuffed cabbage. They are wrapped fairly tightly in cloths, so that they don’t move – they just sort of lie there! This is a clear cultural difference, and we notice it fairly quickly when we read the text, or when we visit one of the countries where this is still done today.
Other elements, however, in this translation at least, would seem to immediately make sense to a modern American, and yet someone from the Middle East would be left scratching his or her head, perplexed. For us, we imagine Joseph driving around the town, with Mary in the back seat breathing deeply with labor pains. Every Holiday Inn or Best Western that they pass has an old, flashing sign in neon lights that reads ‘No Vacancy’. They drive up and down the interstate, but it is the same everywhere. Eventually a kind-hearted person says ‘You can stay in my barn if you like’. There, Mary gives birth and lays the baby Jesus in a food trough that is brand new and completely clean. The fact that Joseph is going to his ancestral home does not have any significance for us. If we go to visit relatives, we’d still quite possibly stay at a motel so that they won’t be put to any extra trouble by our visit. And in our day and age where there is so much movement of people, one’s ancestral home might well not have any relatives in it any longer.
The situation in a Middle Eastern context is radically different. The idea that one could arrive in one’s ancestral home with a pregnant wife and not have anyone offer you hospitality is unthinkable. Inns in the ancient world were used by merchants, prostitutes, and others who had absolutely no ties or roots to speak of. They were emphatically NOT your average Holiday Inn! At any rate, even today, in Eastern contexts if one goes to the place one’s ancestors come from, one does not check into a hotel. One goes to the house of a distant relative and says ‘I am Joseph son of Heli, grandson of Matthat, of the family of David’. The hospitable response is pretty much obligatory. The person will be invited in and will not be sent to stay in the stables – even if it means that the host sleeps on the floor! And thus, a Middle Eastern person reading the text as it is translated in the NIV will be perplexed.
Since the cultural assumptions of the rural Middle East are closer to those presupposed in this verse than our own are, the best course of action for us to take is to ask whether our interpretation and even our translation have not been slanted by incorrect cultural assumptions. So let us try to examine some of our assumptions:
1) We hear ‘manger’ or ‘trough’ and immediately know where we can find one: it will be in the barn. This is so obvious that no one ever thinks to question it. Yet in the rural Middle East even today, one brings one’s animals into the house in the evening. There they provide heat for the house, as well as making sure the animals are protected. In many houses, mangers or troughs are placed in the raised floor of the main room of the house, and animals situated in the lower section could easily eat from them. Something like this:
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2) Middle Eastern hospitality absolutely would require that one invite in even a distant kinsperson in Joseph and Mary’s circumstances. It doesn’t matter how many people were already in the house. It would be shameful to turn them away, just as it would be shamefully insulting for Joseph and Mary to go to stay anywhere other than with relatives. And while for us it would begin to feel crowded to have an additional man and pregnant woman come in and sleep on your floor when you already have guests, Easterners would not feel this. In Romanian, the language and culture from this region that I am most familiar with, there isn’t even a word for privacy. People are used to be doing everything with others present or nearby. And so, when we think about the fact that Mary’s relatives, Zechariah and Elizabeth, lived somewhere in this region, in the ‘hill country of Judea’ (as Luke 1:39 tells us), it stretches the Middle Eastern imagination to imagine Joseph and Mary being in Bethlehem for some time (as 2:6 seems to imply) and no one offering them hospitality.
3) Today Bethlehem is a major city, but in Roman times it was not near a major Roman road, so there is no reason to think that there would have been an inn there. If my wife were to visit her ancestral home, the small village where her family has not lived for decades, not only would the local people not let her stay at an ‘inn’ or motel, but there wouldn’t be one even if she wanted to. With the population of Bethlehem in this period estimated at around 1,000 inhabitants, and no ‘highway’ nearby, the existence of an inn seems unlikely.
4) Having seen all these cultural and historical reasons to rethink the interpretation of this verse, we now need to look and see whether our translation of the Greek word kataluma as ‘inn’ is likely to be correct. In fact, we find that when Luke speaks of a commercial inn, as he does in 10:36, he uses a different word, pandokheion. The only other place where he uses kataluma, the word used here, is in 22:11, where it refers to the upper room, which is clearly not an ‘inn’. The word can also mean ‘guest room’ – in fact, this is a more usual meaning for it than ‘inn’.
And so, we find that reading the text on the basis of Middle Eastern cultural assumptions, the events and words fall into place: Joseph and Mary went to the house of distant relatives. When the time came for the birth, Mary delivered her firstborn, a son, Jesus, and laid him in the trough there in the common family room. And, in case anyone should ask why these guests were not staying in the guest room, Luke informs his reader: ‘because there was no room in the guest room’.
Rethinking this passage’s meaning might seem to spoil a lot of Christmas plays and nativity sets. It may, however, actually help turn what has become a commercialized myth into a historically-rooted and perhaps even a believable event. The birth of Jesus was not the birth of a mythical, imaginary figure, nor of a divine being who only pretended to be human: this is a real, concrete event in space and time, and Luke's story can be seen to accurately reflect the cultural setting into which Luke tells us that Jesus was born. This does not mean that Luke's narrative gives us accurate historical details - the best verdict a historian can give on this subject is 'not proven' - but certainly the story itself reflects the cultural context into which Jesus was born. Whether this is simply realistic writing on Luke's part or the result of Luke having access to and providing his readers with accurate historical information is another matter entirely. I should perhaps also mention that the traditional theological meaning gleaned from the text is not undermined by reinterpreting it in light of a more culturally-informed reading of the text. The king of Israel is born, not in a palace, not in his family’s own home, not even in the guest room of his relatives’ home, but in the common room of a small peasant home in a small, relatively insignificant town in an out-of-the way corner of the world. This picture, more likely to be accurate historically and culturally than the traditional one, may still be interpreted by Christians as indicating that the world was not as ready for his coming as it might have been. But this of course takes us beyond historical study into theology. And there is nothing wrong with that - provided we are aware of the different approaches we are using and their different methods.
Let's now move on to look at Matthew's account of the infancy of Jesus, from a literary and theological perspective...
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