In The Levant

VI.—BETHLEHEM AND MAR SABA

BETHLEHEM lies about seven miles south of Jerusalem. It is also a hill village, reposing upon a stony promontory that is thrust out eastward from the central mountain-range; the abrupt slopes below three sides of it are terraced; on the north is a valley which lies in a direct line between it and Jerusalem; on the east are the yawning ravines and the “wilderness” leading to the Dead Sea; on the south is the wild country towards Hebron, and the sharp summit of the Frank mountain in the distance. The village lies on the ridge; and on the point at the east end of it, overlooking a vast extent of seamed and rocky and jagged country, is the gloomy pile of convents, chapels, and churches that mark the spot of the Nativity.

From its earliest mention till now the home of shepherds and of hardy cultivators of its rocky hillsides, it has been noted for the free spirit and turbulence of its inhabitants. The primal character of a place seems to have the power of perpetuating itself in all changes. Bethlehem never seems to have been afflicted with servility. During the period of David’s hiding in the Cave Adullam the warlike Philistines occupied it, but David was a fit representative of the pluck and steadfastness of its people. Since the Christian era it has been a Christian town, as it is to-day, and the few Moslems who have settled there, from time to time, have found it more prudent to withdraw than to brave its hostility. Its women incline to be handsome, and have rather European than Oriental features, and they enjoy the reputation of unusual virtue; the men are industrious, and seem to have more selfrespect than the Syrians generally.

Bethlehem is to all the world one of the sweetest of words. A tender and romantic interest is thrown about it as the burial-place of Rachel, as the scene of Ruth’s primitive story, and of David’s boyhood and kingly consecration; so that no other place in Judæa, by its associations, was so fit to be the gate through which the Divine Child should come into the world. And the traveller to-day can visit it, with, perhaps, less shock to his feelings of reverence, certainly with a purer and simpler enjoyment, than any other place in Holy Land. He finds its ruggedness and desolateness picturesque, in the light of old song and story, and even the puerile inventions of monkish credulity do not affect him as elsewhere.

From Jerusalem we reach Bethlehem by following a curving ridge,—a lovely upland ride, on account of the extensive prospect and the breeze, and because it is always a relief to get out of the city. The country is, however, as stony as the worst portions of New England,—the mountain sheep-pastures; thick, double stone-walls enclosing small fields do not begin to exhaust the stones. On both sides of the ridge are bare, unproductive hills, but the sides of the valleys are terraced, and covered with a good growth of olive-trees. These hollows were no doubt once very fruitful by assiduous cultivation, in spite of the stones. Bethlehem, as we saw it across a deep ravine, was like a castle on a hill; there is nowhere level ground enough for a table to stand, off the ridges, and we looked in vain for the “plains of Bethlehem” about which we had tried, trustfully, to sing in youth.

Within a mile of Bethlehem gate we came to the tomb of Rachel, standing close by the highway. “And Rachel died, and was buried in the way to Ephrath, which is Bethlehem. And Jacob set a pillar upon her grave: that is the pillar of Rachel’s grave unto this day.” This is the testimony of the author of Genesis, who had not seen the pillar which remained to his day, but repeated the tradition of the sons of Jacob. What remained of this pillar, after the absence of the Israelites for some five centuries from Bethlehem, is uncertain; but it may be supposed that some spot near Bethlehem was identified as the tomb of Rachel upon their return, and that the present site is the one then selected. It is possible, of course, that the tradition of the pagan Canaanites may have preserved the recollection of the precise spot. At any rate, Christians seem to agree that this is one of the few ancient sites in Judæa which are authentic, and the Moslems pay it equal veneration. The square, unpretentious building erected over it is of modern construction, and the pilgrim has to content himself with looking at a sort of Moslem tomb inside, and reflecting, if he can, upon the pathetic story of the death of the mother of Joseph.

There is, alas! everywhere in Judæa something to drive away sentiment as well as pious feeling. The tomb of Rachel is now surrounded by a Moslem cemetery, and as we happened to be there on Thursday we found ourselves in the midst of a great gathering of women, who had come there, according to their weekly custom, to weep and to wail. .

You would not see in farthest Nubia a more barbarous assemblage, and not so fierce an one. In the presence of these wild mourners the term “gentler sex” has a ludicrous sound. Yet we ought not to forget that we were intruders upon their periodic grief, attracted to their religious demonstration merely by curiosity, and fairly entitled to nothing but scowls and signs of aversion. I am sure that we should give bold Moslem intruders upon our hours of sorrow at home no better reception. The women were in the usual Syrian costume; their loose gowns gaped open at the bosom, and they were without veils, and made no pretence of drawing a shawl before their faces; all wore necklaces of coins, and many of them had circlets of coins on the head, with strips depending from them, also stiff with silver pieces. A woman’s worth was thus easily to be reckoned, for her entire fortune was on her head. A pretty face was here and there to be seen, but most of them were flaringly ugly, and—to liken them to what they most resembled—physically and mentally the type of the North American squaws. They were accompanied by all their children, and the little brats were tumbling about the tombs, and learning the language of woe.

Among the hundreds of women present, the expression of grief took two forms,—one active, the other more resigned. A group seated itself about a tomb, and the members swayed their bodies to and fro, howled at the top of their voices, and pretended to weep. I had the infidel curiosity to go from group to group in search of a tear, but I did not see one. Occasionally some interruption, like the arrival of a new mourner, would cause the swaying and howling to cease for a moment, or it would now and then be temporarily left to the woman at the head of the grave, but presently all would fall to again and abandon themselves to the luxury of agony. It was perhaps unreasonable to expect tears from creatures so withered as most of these were; but they worked themselves into a frenzy of excitement, they rolled up their blue checked cotton handkerchiefs, drew them across their eyes, and then wrung them out with gestures of despair. It was the dryest grief I ever saw.

The more active mourners formed a ring in a clear spot. Some thirty women standing with their faces toward the centre, their hands on each other’s shoulders, circled round with unrhythmic steps, crying and singing, and occasionally jumping up and down with all their energy, like the dancers of Horace, “striking the ground with equal feet,” coming down upon the earth with a heavy thud, at the same time slapping their faces with their hands; then circling around again with faster steps, and shriller cries, and more prolonged ululations, and anon pausing to jump and beat the ground with a violence sufficient to shatter their frames. The loose flowing robes, the clinking of the silver ornaments, the wild gleam of their eyes, the Bacchantic madness of their saltations, the shrill shrieking and wailing, conspired to give their demonstration an indescribable barbarity. This scene has recurred every Thursday for, I suppose, hundreds of years, within a mile of the birthplace of Jesus.

Bethlehem at a little distance presents an appearance that its interior does not maintain; but it is so much better than most Syrian villages of its size (it has a population of about three thousand), and is so much cleaner than Jerusalem, that we are content with its ancient though commonplace aspect. But the atmosphere of the town is thoroughly commercial, or perhaps I should say industrial; you do not find in it that rural and reposeful air which you associate with the birthplace of our Lord. The people are sharp, to a woman, and have a keen eye for the purse of the stranger. Every other house is a shop for the manufacture or sale of some of the Bethlehem specialties,—carvings in olive-wood and ivory and mother-of-pearl, crosses and crucifixes, and models of the Holy Sepulchre, and every sort of sacred trinket, and beads in endless variety; a little is done also in silver-work, especially in rings. One may chance upon a Mecca ring there; but the ring peculiar to Bethlehem is a silver wedding-ring; it is a broad and singular band of silver with pendants, and is worn upon the thumb. As soon as we come into the town, we are beset with sellers of various wares, and we never escape them except when we are in the convent.

The Latin convent opens its doors to tourists; it is a hospitable house, and the monks are very civil; they let us sit in a salle-à-manger, while waiting for dinner, that was as damp and chill as a dungeon, and they gave us a well-intended but uneatable meal, and the most peculiar wine, all at a good price. The wine, white and red, was made by the monks, they said with some pride; we tried both kinds, and I can recommend it to the American Temperance Union: if it can be introduced to the public, the public will embrace total abstinence with enthusiasm.

While we were waiting for the proper hour to visit the crypt of the Nativity, we went out upon the esplanade before the convent, and looked down into the terraced ravines which are endeared to us by so many associations. Somewhere down there is the patch of ground that the mighty man of wealth, Boaz, owned, in which sweet Ruth went gleaning in the barley-harvest. What a picture of a primitive time it is,—the noonday meal of Boaz and his handmaidens, Ruth invited to join them, and dip her morsel in the vinegar with the rest, and the hospitable Boaz handing her parched corn. We can understand why Ruth had good gleaning over this stony ground, after the rakes of the handmaidens. We know that her dress did not differ from that worn by Oriental women now; for her “veil,” which Boaz filled with six measures of barley, was the head-shawl still almost universally worn,—though not by the Bethlehemite women. Their head-dress is peculiar; there seems to be on top of the head a square frame, and over this is thrown and folded a piece of white doth. The women are thus in a manner crowned, and the dress is as becoming as the somewhat similar head-covering of the Roman peasants. We learn also in the story of Ruth that the mother-in-law in her day was as wise in the ways of men as she is now. “Sit still, my daughter,” she counselled her after she returned with the veil full of barley, “until thou know how the matter will fall, for the man will not be in rest until he have finished the thing this day.”

Down there, somewhere in that wilderness of ravines, David, the great-grandson of Ruth, kept his father’s sheep before he went to the combat with Goliath. It was there—the grotto is shown a little more than a mile from this convent—that the shepherds watched their flocks by night when the angel appeared and announced the birth of the Messiah, the Son of David. We have here within the grasp of the eye almost the beginning and the end of the old dispensation, from the burial of Rachel to the birth of our Lord, from the passing of the wandering sheykh, Jacob, with his family, to the end put to the exclusive pretensions of his descendants by the coming of a Saviour to all the world.

The cave called the Grotto of the Nativity has great antiquity. The hand-book says it had this repute as early as the second century. In the year 327 the mother of Constantine built a church over it, and this basilica still stands, and is the oldest specimen of Christian architecture in existence, except perhaps the lower church of St. Clement at Rome. It is the oldest basilica above ground retaining its perfect ancient form. The main part of the church consists of a nave and four aisles, separated by four rows of Corinthian marble columns, tradition says, taken from the temple of Solomon. The walls were once adorned with mosaics, but only fragments of them remain; the roof is decayed and leaky, the pavement is broken. This part of the church is wholly neglected, because it belongs to the several sects in common, and is merely the arena for an occasional fight. The choir is separated from the nave by a wall, and is divided into two chapels, one of the Greeks, the other of the Armenians. The Grotto of the Nativity is underneath these chapels, and each sect has a separate staircase of descent to it. The Latin chapel is on the north side of this choir, and it also has a stairway to the subterranean apartments.

Making an effort to believe that the stable of the inn in which Christ was born was a small subterranean cave cut in the solid rock, we descended a winding flight of stairs from the Latin chapel, with a monk for our guide, and entered a labyrinth from which we did not emerge until we reached the place of the nativity, and ascended into the Greek chapel above it. We walked between glistening walls of rock, illuminated by oil-lamps here and there, and in our exploration of the gloomy passages and chambers, encountered shrines, pictures, and tombs of the sainted. We saw, or were told that we saw, the spot to which St. Joseph retired at the moment of the nativity, and also the place where the twenty thousand children who were murdered by the order of Herod—a ghastly subject so well improved by the painters of the Renaissance—are buried. But there was one chamber, or rather vault, that we entered with genuine emotion. This was the cell of Jerome, hermit and scholar, whose writings have gained him the title of Father of the Church.

At the close of the fourth century Bethlehem was chiefly famous as the retreat of this holy student, and the fame of his learning and sanctity drew to it from distant lands many faithful women, who renounced the world and its pleasures, and were content to sit at his feet and learn the way of life. Among those who resigned, and, for his sake and the cross, despised, the allurements and honors of the Roman world, was the devout Paula, a Roman matron who traced her origin from Agamemnon, and numbered the Scipios and Gracchi among her ancestors, while her husband, Joxotius, deduced a no less royal lineage from Æneas. Her wealth was sufficient to support the dignity of such a descent; among her possessions, an item in her rent-roll, was the city of Nicopolis, which Augustus built as a monument of the victory of Actium. By the advice and in the company of Jerome, her spiritual guide, she abandoned Rome and all her vast estates, and even her infant son, and retired to the holy village of Bethlehem. The great Jerome, who wrote her biography, and transmitted the story of her virtues to the most distant ages, bestowed upon her the singular title of the Mother-in-law of God! She was buried here, and we look upon her tomb with scarcely less interest than that of Jerome himself, who also rests in this thrice holy ground. At the beginning of the fifth century, when the Goths sacked Rome, a crowd of the noble and the rich, escaping with nothing saved from the wreck but life and honor, attracted also by the reputation of Jerome, appeared as beggars in the streets of this humble village. No doubt they thronged to the cell of the venerable father.

There is, I suppose, no doubt that this is the study in which he composed many of his more important treatises. It is a vaulted chamber, about twenty feet square by nine feet high. There is in Venice a picture of the study of Jerome, painted by Carpaccio, which represents a delightful apartment; the saint is seen in his study, in a rich négligé robe; at the side of his desk are musical instruments, music-stands, and sheets of music, as if he were accustomed to give soirées; on the chimney-piece are Greek vases and other objects of virtu, and in the middle of the room is a poodle-dog of the most worldly and useless of the canine breed. The artist should have seen the real study of the hermit,—a grim, unornamented vault, in which he passed his days in mortifications of the body, hearing always ringing in his ears, in his disordered mental and physical condition, the last trump of judgment.

We passed, groping our way along in this religious cellar, through a winding, narrow passage in the rock, some twenty-five feet long, and came into the place of places, the very Chapel of the Nativity. In this low vault, thirty-eight feet long and eleven feet wide, hewn in the rock, is an altar at one end. Before this altar—and we can see everything with distinctness, for sixteen silver lamps are burning about it—there is a marble slab in the pavement into which is let a silver star, with this sentence round it: Hic de Virgine Maria Jesus Christus natus est. The guardian of this sacred spot was a Turkish soldier, who stood there with his gun and fixed bayonet, an attitude which experience has taught him is necessary to keep the peace among the Christians who meet here. The altar is without furniture, and is draped by each sect which uses it in turn. Near by is the chapel of the “manger,” but the manger in which Christ was laid is in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome.

There is in Bethlehem another ancient cave which is almost as famous as that of the Nativity; it is called the Milk Grotto, and during all ages of the Church a most marvellous virtue has attached to it; fragments of the stone have been, and still continue to be, broken off and sent into all Christian countries; women also make pilgrimages to it in faith. The grotto is on the edge of the town overlooking the eastern ravines, and is arranged as a show-place. In our walk thither a stately Bedawee, as by accident, fell into our company, and acted as our cicerone. He was desirous that we should know that he also was a man of the world and of travel, and rated at its proper value this little corner of the earth. He had served in the French army and taken part in many battles, and had been in Paris and seen the tomb of the great emperor,—ah, there was a man! As to this grotto, they say that the Virgin used to send to it for milk,—many think so. As for him, he was a soldier, and did not much give his mind to such things.

This grotto is an excavation in the chalky rock, and might be a very good place to store milk, but for the popular prejudice in cities against chalk and water. We entered it through the court of a private house, and the damsel who admitted us also assured us that the Virgin procured milk from it. The tradition is that the Virgin and Child were concealed here for a time before the flight into Egypt; and ever since then its stone has the miraculous power of increasing the flow of the maternal breast. The early fathers encouraged this and the like superstitions in the docile minds of their fair converts, and themselves testified to the efficacy of this remarkable stone. These superstitions belong rather to the Orient than to any form of religion. There is a famous spring at Assiout in Egypt which was for centuries much resorted to by ladies who desired offspring; and the Arabs on the Upper Nile to-day, who wish for an heir male, resort to a plant which grows in the remote desert, rare and difficult to find, the leaves of which are “good for boys.” This grotto scarcely repays the visit, except for the view one obtains of the wild country below it. When we bade good by to the courtly Arab, we had too much delicacy to offer money to such a gentleman and a soldier of the empire; a delicacy not shared by him, however, for he let no false modesty hinder a request for a little backsheesh for tobacco.

On our return, and at some distance from the gate, we diverged into a lane, and sought, in a rocky field, the traditional well whose waters David longed for when he was in the Cave of Adullam,—“O that one would give me drink of the water of the well of Bethlehem, which is by the gate!” Howbeit, when the three mighty men had broken through the Philistine guards and procured him the water, David would not drink that which was brought at such a sacrifice. Two very comely Bethlehem girls hastened at our approach to draw water from the well and gave us to drink, with all the freedom of Oriental hospitality, in which there is always an expectation of backsheesh. The water is at any rate very good, and there is no reason why these pretty girls should not turn an honest penny upon the strength of David’s thirst, whether this be the well whose water he desired or not. We were only too thankful that no miraculous property is attributed to its waters. As we returned, we had the evening light upon the gray walls and towers of the city, and were able to invest it with something of its historical dignity.

The next excursion that we made from Jerusalem was so different from the one to Bethlehem, that by way of contrast I put them together. It was to the convent of Mar Saba, which lies in the wilderness towards the Dead Sea, about two hours and a half from the city.

In those good old days, when piety was measured by frugality in the use of the bath, when the holy fathers praised most those hermits who washed least, when it might perhaps be the boast of more than one virgin, devoted to the ascetic life, that she had lived fifty-eight years during which water had touched neither her hands, her face, her feet, nor any part of her body, Palestine was, after Egypt, the favorite resort of the fanatical, the unfortunate, and the lazy, who, gathered into communities, or dwelling in solitary caves, offered to the barbarian world a spectacle of superstition and abasement under the name of Christianity. But of the swarm of hermits and monks who begged in the cities and burrowed in the caves of the Holy Land in the fifth century, no one may perhaps be spoken of with more respect than St. Sabas, who, besides a reputation for sanctity, has left that of manliness and a virile ability, which his self-mortifications did not extirpate. And of all the monasteries of that period, that of Mar Saba is the only one in Judæa which has preserved almost unbroken the type of that time. St. Sabas was a Cappadocian who came to Palestine in search of a permanent retreat, savage enough to satisfy his austere soul. He found it in a cave in one of the wildest gorges in this most desolate of lands, a ravine which opens into the mountains from the brook Kidron. The fame of his zeal and piety attracted thousands to his neighborhood, so that at one time there were almost as many hermits roosting about in the rocks near him as there are inhabitants in the city of Jerusalem now. He was once enabled to lead an army of monks to that city and chastise the Monophysite heretics. His cave in the steep side of a rocky precipice became the nucleus of his convent, which grew around it and attached itself to the face of the rock as best it could. For the convent of Mar Saba is not a building, nor a collection of buildings, so much as it is a group of nests attached to the side of a precipice.

It was a bright Saturday afternoon that a young divinity student and I, taking the volatile Demetrius with us for interpreter, rode out of St. Stephen’s gate, into Jehoshaphat, past the gray field of Jewish graves, down through Tophet and the wild ravine of the Kidron.

It is unpleasant to interrupt the prosperous start of a pilgrimage by a trifling incident, but at our first descent and the slightest tension on the bridle-reins of my horse, they parted from the bit. This accident, which might be serious in other lands, is of the sort that is anticipated here, and I may say assured, by the forethought of the owners of saddle-horses. Upon dismounting with as much haste as dignity, I discovered that the reins had been fastened to the bit by a single rotten string of cotton. Luckily the horse I rode was not an animal to take advantage of the weakness of his toggery. He was a Syrian horse, a light sorrel, and had no one of the good points of a horse except the name and general shape. His walk was slow and reluctant, his trot a high and non-progressive jolt, his gallop a large up-and-down agitation. To his bridle of strings and shreds no martingale was attached; no horse in Syria is subject to that restraint. When I pull the bit he sticks up his nose; when I switch him he kicks. When I hold him in, he won’t go; when I let him loose, he goes on his nose. I dismount and look at him with curiosity; I wonder all the journey what his forte is, but I never discover. I conclude that he is like the emperor Honorius, whom Gibbon stigmatizes as “without passions, and consequently without talents.”