1Now you shall gather yourself in troops,
daughter of troops.
He has laid siege against us.
They will strike the judge of Israel with a rod on the cheek.
2But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah,
being small among the clans of Judah,
out of you one will come out to me who is to be ruler in Israel;
whose goings out are from of old, from ancient times.
3Therefore he will abandon them until the time that she who is in labor gives birth.
Then the rest of his brothers will return to the children of Israel.
4He shall stand, and shall shepherd in the strength of Yahweh,
in the majesty of the name of Yahweh his God.
They will live, for then he will be great to the ends of the earth.
5He will be our peace when Assyria invades our land
and when he marches through our fortresses,
then we will raise against him seven shepherds,
and eight leaders of men.
6They will rule the land of Assyria with the sword,
and the land of Nimrod in its gates.
He will deliver us from the Assyrian,
when he invades our land,
and when he marches within our border.
7The remnant of Jacob will be among many peoples
like dew from Yahweh,
like showers on the grass,
that don’t wait for man
nor wait for the sons of men.
8The remnant of Jacob will be among the nations,
among many peoples,
like a lion among the animals of the forest,
like a young lion among the flocks of sheep;
who, if he goes through, treads down and tears in pieces,
and there is no one to deliver.
9Let your hand be lifted up above your adversaries,
and let all of your enemies be cut off.
10“It will happen in that day”, says Yahweh,
“that I will cut off your horses from among you
and will destroy your chariots.
11I will cut off the cities of your land
and will tear down all your strongholds.
12I will destroy witchcraft from your hand.
You shall have no soothsayers.
13I will cut off your engraved images and your pillars from among you;
and you shall no more worship the work of your hands.
14I will uproot your Asherah poles from among you;
and I will destroy your cities.
15I will execute vengeance in anger
and wrath on the nations that didn’t listen.”
Bethlehem resides in the hill country of Judah on the ridge route between Jerusalem and Hebron. To the West of Bethlehem is ample agriculturale land and to the east is the Judean Desert – good for shepherding--- which descends down to the Dead Sea. It may be that its location with good farming land brought about the name Beit Lechem – “house of bread,” or the name in Arabic related to shepherding, Beit Lacham, “house of meat.” Both traditions of farming and shepherding play an important place here in the Biblical stories: Boaz had a field which Ruth gleaned from (Ruth 2), David tended Jesse’s sheep (1 Sam 17) and was anointed here by Samuel (1 Sam 16). And, shepherds heard the good news about the Messiah’s birth (Luke 2).
Tel Beit Lehem today is mainly covered by the Nativity Square and the Nativity Church but a small portion of the tel on the east side is still bare and was surveyed in 1969 by Gutman and Berman, confirming both Bronze and Iron Age occupation. While tradition points to a well north of the tel where three of David’s mighty men drew water for David after breaking through the Philistine garrison (2 Sam 23:14,16), the only real water sources came from the southeast in the area of “Solomon’s Pools” or “Artas,” likely biblical Etam (2 Chr 11:6; Greek Apan/Aitan).
Not only was Yeshua (Jesus) born in Bethlehem as Micah 5:2 foretold, but Herod murdered the innocents in the area (Mat 2:8,26) and Hadrian built a sacred grove to Adonis after pounding the messianic Bar Kochva supporters into submission (Jerome, Ep. ad Paul, lviii.3). Jerome, supported by Paula and her daughter Eustochium, came permanently to Bethlehem in AD 382 to study Hebrew and translate the Hebrew Bible into the common language, Latin. His translation remained the foundation for all western Scriptural reading for 1600 years.
Multiple excavations by Harvey, Vincent and Abel in the early 1900’s and subsequent studies have revealed three main levels of architectural remains of the Church of the Nativity: an early Roman church represented by floor mosaics from Constantine’s era (about AD 325), a Byzantine Church built by Justinian in the sixth century AD which amazingly still stands today, and Crusader restorations in the twelfth-century AD, as seen in the mosaic decoration on the high walls of the nave. The altar of the Church of the Nativity is built upon a large cave structure that from the second century AD iwas the venerated place of the Yeshua’s birth. already from the second century AD (Justin Martyr and the Protoevangelium of James).