During our Advent Bible Study, a few people were
surprised when we saw an image that looked a lot like this one. It is a feeding trough, a manger, from the
part of the world where Jesus lived. For
many of us who grew up in northern woodlands, this is not at all what we have
been taught or expect. For most of our
lives we have grown up with the idea that the manger in which Mary and Joseph
placed the baby Jesus was a wooden thing made with boards nailed into an ‘X’ on
each end and this doesn’t quite seem right.
For us, a people who are accustomed to being surrounded by trees,
building things from stone seems unnecessarily difficult. Where we live, trees grow wild and we have to
mow, trim, cut and work to keep them from growing where we don’t want
them. Israel (and all of the Near East)
is a different place. Take a look at the
pictures and videos that are available, look at the pictures you can find in
books about Israel. You will likely
notice that in much of the country, trees are not common and often, where they are more common, they are tended
and cultivated as food producing crops, not as building materials. In that part of the world, stone is a much
more common building material… for many things.
Stone is used not because it is easier or cheaper (it isn’t) but because
it’s what they have.
I saw this image a year or two ago and I have had
conversations about Near Eastern building materials before so this didn’t
really surprise me. What struck me however
came later when I opened this month’s issue of Biblical Archaeology Review and
read an article on the Tomb of Pharaoh’s Daughter in Jerusalem. There, included in the article, were
photographs of stone sarcophaguses (sarcophagi?) found in and near
Jerusalem. I could not get copies of
these pictures but they are similar to this one.
Before the front wall of this was broken out, it
would have looked strikingly like a stone manger.
An argument could be made that tombs that contain
this sort of sarcophagus were built only for the rich and powerful of Israel’s
elite. Jesus would never have been
buried in such a tomb… and yet… far more common in that time, even for middle
class and poorer folks were burials in stone ossuaries, bone boxes, in which the
remains of a buried person were re-buried.
Jesus came to earth to sacrifice his life and die on
the cross for our sins.
Was his death
and burial foreshadowed by the manger in which he slept on the day of his birth,
or was it an accident?
Either way, it makes you think.
