The Crown and the Cross: The Life of Christ (5 page)

“Rest here a while,” he told the Magi. “I will see that you are given refreshment and we will speak again soon about where this babe may be found. It may be that someone among the priests and scholars will know from the ancient writings the location of His birth.”

As soon as the visitors were out of the room Herod summoned the high priest and others among the priestly hierarchy who worked closely with him in Jerusalem. Belonging to the party known popularly as the Sadducees, the chief priests had perhaps known more prosperity and favor during the reign of Herod than in any previous period since the kingdom of Solomon, and were heavily obligated to him. To them Herod put the question, “Where shall the Christ be born?”

The least learned among the priests knew the answer, for the prophet Micah had written long ago: “But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of you shall come forth to Me the One to be Ruler in Israel, whose goings forth are from of old, from everlasting.”

Even Herod understood that this prophecy referred to no ordinary king. The phrase “whose goings forth are from of old, from everlasting,” must mean that the ruler who would one day come out of Bethlehem had been eternal with God from the beginning. And that description fit only the Messiah.

Herod knew now that he must take immediate steps to destroy this newborn child who threatened everything for which he had worked. After sending the priests and scribes away, he called the wise men from Arabia to him again.

“Go and search carefully for the young Child,” he told them. “When you have found Him, bring back word to me, that I may come and worship Him also.”

The Magi left Jerusalem at once. Hardly were they outside the city when the star, which they had not been able to see for several nights and whose absence had led them to go to Jerusalem and ask Herod where the newborn king might be found, shone bright and clear before them. Nor did it falter in its brilliance all the way to Bethlehem and the home of Joseph the carpenter.

When he arose, he took the young Child and His mother by night and departed for Egypt.

Matthew 2:14

Joseph and Mary had been disturbed by the coming of the shepherds to the inn on the night Jesus was born and the strange story they told of a voice from heaven announcing the birth of the Christ. In spite of the visits of the angel to Mary before her conception and to Joseph in the dream, they did not yet really understand the true identity of the child they had been instructed to call Jesus. But as the days passed uneventfully in Bethlehem and Joseph began to establish himself there as a carpenter and builder, the memory of those events had begun to grow faint. After Mary had accomplished the rite of purification in the temple and the child had been redeemed, their lives had once again taken up the even tenor to which they were accustomed. Bethlehem was a larger city than Nazareth and its proximity to Jerusalem, in addition to the fact that he had kinsfolk there, made it a more profitable place for Joseph to work, so he and Mary were soon busy in the quiet and pleasant life both preferred.

The coming of the dark-skinned Magi from Arabia had sharply interrupted the routine of their lives, and the stories the men told of being guided by a star to the birthplace of the King of the Jews had been disturbing. Even the precious gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh showered upon the baby by the visitors were out of place in the humble home of Joseph and Mary, and they were afraid that once the wise men were gone, an envious neighbor might report them to Herod’s police on a charge of having stolen the treasures which were so obviously beyond their meager means.

Nor did their conversation with the Magi ease the minds of Joseph and Mary. The visitors from Arabia had not been deceived by Herod’s pretext of wanting to locate the baby in order to worship Him. They strongly warned Joseph against the king and even left for their own country by a route which did not take them back to Jerusalem.

Thus, at a time when they were just becoming pleasantly situated in Bethlehem, Joseph and Mary faced the urgent necessity of fleeing in order to save Jesus from Herod. The strange visit of the Magi and the lavish gifts the men from the East had brought, to say nothing of the story of how they had been guided on the long journey westward from Arabia, had caused considerable talk in Bethlehem. And with the town almost in the shadow of the grim castle called the Herodeion, word might spread to Herod almost any day.

Joseph’s first impulse was to return to Nazareth, but Herod ruled there too, and if any more events like those which had taken place since the birth of Jesus occurred, the king’s attention must certainly be drawn to them, even in Galilee. The Samaritan country north of Jerusalem was likewise in Herod’s territory; besides, they could hope for no refuge among the Samaritans, who hated the Jews as intensely as the Jews hated them. Only one route of flight seemed at all safe, that southward by way of Hebron into Egypt, the route Abraham had taken more than two thousand years before when famine had driven him from Canaan. But that meant going into an alien land with all the hardships and uncertainty such a journey entailed.

Joseph tried to hide his troubled thoughts from Mary as he finished his chores and lay down to sleep. Busy caring for the child and still excited over the homage of the Magi and the precious gifts brought to Jesus, Mary did not fully realize the extent of the danger that faced them. Besides, women were accustomed to leaving such questions and decisions to the men of the family.

For a while Joseph could not sleep. His mind surveyed again and again the possibilities that lay before them, but could find nothing reassuring in any course they might follow. Finally he slept from sheer weariness and almost immediately began to dream. In his dream he heard once again the voice of the angel who had spoken to him at the time when he was considering putting Mary away with a letter of divorcement after learning that she was already with child. And as on that other occasion, the angelic voice resolved his uncertainty.

“Arise, take the young Child and His mother, flee to Egypt,” the angel directed. “And stay there until I bring you word; for Herod will seek the young Child to destroy Him.”

Awakening, Joseph did not hesitate to obey. Rousing Mary, he began making preparations for the journey. Flight into Egypt meant leaving everything they had gained in Bethlehem—a home, Joseph’s business as a carpenter, the kinsmen and friends who had welcomed them. But when Joseph repeated the words of the angel to Mary, she did not hesitate. While she gathered their clothing together, Joseph went to arouse a kinsman and purchase a second mule to carry their possessions and the gifts of the Magi. He could not risk waiting for the regular markets to open in the morning, for there had been an urgency to the voice in the dream that warned him no time was to be lost.

The kinsman who was routed from his bed asked questions, but Joseph put him off as best he could while they bargained for the mule. Because of the urgency, he paid a higher price than he would have had to pay in the regular market, and most of his supply of coins was used up in buying the animal. He did not worry about that, however. The gold given them by the Magi as a present for the child, as well as the valuable gifts of frankincense and myrrh, could be readily exchanged in Egypt for lodging and the necessities of life, but he did not dare display them there in Bethlehem lest word reach the authorities and he be held on suspicion of theft before they could escape from the country.

Mary was saddened at having to leave Bethlehem, but the danger to Jesus put all other considerations from her mind. While Joseph was buying the mule, she busied herself binding up their meager possessions into packs which could be strapped on the backs of the animals. The gifts of the Magi she carefully secreted in the middle of a roll containing extra clothing and their sleeping pallets. What food was in the house was wrapped in a cloth so it could be lashed to the back of one of the mules along with the waterskin and their few cooking utensils.

Joseph’s tools formed an important part of their belongings and these were carefully placed in a goatskin bag. With them he would need only a few moments’ work in their new home to prove his skill as a carpenter. Artisans such as he moved about frequently, and the tools, plus proof of his ability to use them, were the only passport they needed in a world where the famous
Pax Romana
had opened the borders of all countries, except the few areas on the fringes of the empire where fighting was still going on.

It was almost dawn before they finished loading their belongings on the backs of the two animals. Jesus had been sleeping in the cradle Joseph had made for Him, and their last act before leaving Bethlehem was to lash this on top of one of the packs. Mary would walk and carry the baby in her arms much of the time, but for the rest of it He could lie in the cradle while she walked beside the animal. With her hand to steady the cradle, the rocking gait of the mule would lull the child to sleep. Whatever discomfort Joseph and Mary were to experience in this abrupt flight from their homeland, they were determined that Jesus should know as little of it as possible.

As they left Bethlehem dawn was breaking over the range of hills to the east that hid the leaden surface of the Sea of Judgment and the sulfurous mists, relics of the brimstone which had destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, rising from it. The town still slept and Joseph led the pack animals carefully lest their footfalls arouse the soldiers of the small garrison assigned there to keep order and remind the people not to cheat the tax gatherers. They would have had trouble enough explaining why they were moving southward at such an hour, and if the treasures hidden deep inside the roll of sleeping pallets were discovered, could hope for nothing less severe than being hailed before a magistrate to explain whence such valuable things came.

As they took the road to Hebron, the castle of Herodeion was a grim reminder to them of the reason for their flight, but they did not yet feel the wrench of parting that would be their experience when they left Israel itself. Hebron, seventeen miles away, was the home of Elisabeth and Zacharias to whom Mary had gone after the angel’s announcement of Jesus’ conception. To anyone who questioned them, they planned to answer merely that they were going to visit this well-known priest and his family.

The road to Hebron led through a region rich in the history of Israel. When God had promised this land to the seed of Abraham, Hebron was already a chief city of the great Hittite Empire. Rameses II, the Pharaoh from whose grip Moses had delivered the Children of Israel, had broken the back of the Hittite confederation, but the promise of God to Abraham had not been completely fulfilled until Joshua had given Hebron and the surrounding territory to Caleb, his faithful lieutenant and the only other man of the generation that left Egypt to enter the Promised Land. In the cave of Machpelah near Hebron, Abraham had buried his beloved wife Sarah. There, too, his own body lay with that of Jacob, brought up out of Egypt by his son Joseph in a magnificent funeral procession.

Altogether this was hallowed ground through which Joseph and Mary passed as they fled toward Egypt with Jesus. Long a heritage of the priests of Israel, Hebron was also a city of refuge, but Joseph knew the reputation of Herod and dared not rely upon his respecting that ancient tradition. They paused there only long enough to spend the night with Zacharias and Elisabeth, and to see the son born to them after the vision of Zacharias in the temple and dedicated by the Most High as a prophet. Some six months older than Jesus, John was a fine, strapping boy and a joy to his parents in these their later years.

Early the next morning the travelers set out again along the road leading to the border of Egypt at Beersheba, only a day’s travel southward. The roadsides around Hebron were lined with grape arbors, the vines now bare of leaves. For over two thousand years much of the wine of Hebron had been boiled down to about one-third of its bulk to form a syrup called
dibash
or honey, some of which Jacob had sent to Egypt as a present to his son Joseph, long since given up for dead after being sold into slavery by his brothers.

On some other occasion Joseph and Mary might have enjoyed traveling through this region, so sacred to the history of Israel, but they could not help feeling sad now at leaving the land they loved. At Beersheba they crossed over the border into Egypt and, continuing two more days through the Wilderness of Shur, came to the “River of Egypt” which Moses had been instructed by God to use as a part of the borders of the Promised Land of Canaan. At Migdol, the frontier fortress of Egypt, they passed through the customs and at last were safe from Herod.

To a Jew, Egypt was a land of opportunity second only to his homeland. Greatly favored by Alexander when he had conquered Egypt, large numbers of Jews had migrated into the country. Here they had prospered and in some places, notably Alexandria, formed a large and racially distinct group with their own ethnarch as governor. As a skilled worker in wood, Joseph had little trouble in gaining membership in the guild of carpenters when he arrived at Tanis, the first large city south of the border. Here, in a friendly and warm land at the mouth of the Nile, he settled his family and began to work.

Even though far from his home in Israel, Joseph was not handling alien timber. Almost thirteen hundred years earlier, Israelite slaves had labored in this very city, building for their Egyptian masters. Jewish hands had helped care for the forests which now provided timbers for Joseph’s saw, adze, chisels, and drills.

More recently Cleopatra had conspired with Mark Antony to deprive Herod for a while of most of the marvelously valuable seacoast cities of Palestine, as well as the lovely city of Jericho with its surrounding fields and gardens. There grew the balsam bush said to have come first from seeds brought as a gift to King Solomon by the Queen of Sheba. Cuttings of balsam, along with many other plants that flourished in warm and sunny Jericho, long favored as a winter resort by Romans and rich Jews, had been transferred at Cleopatra’s order to the banks of the Nile where they grew and thrived as an herbal garden in the nearby city called On by the Jews. Although both Joseph and Mary yearned for beautiful Galilee, for all that was so particularly lacking in the flat Nile delta—the hills, valleys, and rushing streams of that mountainous land—yet they could hardly help being happy in Egypt. Jesus, too, thrived and was soon toddling about, exploring the exciting world of early childhood.

As he waited for the Magi to return and betray the whereabouts of the infant Messiah, Herod had grown more and more impatient, finally sending an envoy to Bethlehem in search of them. When the envoy came back with news that the wise men had departed for Arabia by the southern route, the king realized that they had fully understood the nature of his interest in the child whose star had led them from the east and had taken the alternate route homeward to avoid revealing His whereabouts.

Enraged at being thwarted in his intention to kill this child whose birth the star had announced, Herod next did a thing which for sheer horror eclipsed any of his previous crimes. An order was issued that all children under the age of two in Bethlehem and its immediate environs should be killed. The star had been seen by the Magi only a little more than a year before, and Herod thought by this brutal slaughter of innocent babes to be certain of destroying the child who was the Messiah. Hebron was not included in the sweeping edict, and the son of Zacharias and Elisabeth was spared. But there was weeping and wailing in Bethlehem as had been foretold by the prophet Jeremiah who said long ago, “A voice was heard in Ramah, lamentation, weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.”