The Nativity Decoded
The manger
Today we think of a manger as a wooden feeding trough. To modern minds putting a newborn baby in such a ‘cradle’ indicates that his parents were of humble birth and had to do the best they could in the poorest conditions. But this may not have been how the people of Palestine understood it at the time.
In The Nativity Decoded, an archaeologist studying a 1st-century Jewish house near Jerusalem shows presenter Robert Beckford a manger cut into the rock floor, saying that this would have been a natural place to put a baby. It was the warmest part of the house and, if Mary and Joseph had arrived from outside the area after a long journey, it would have been customary for family members to invite them to stay so their child could be born in the comfort of their home.
The tableaux of the nativity that we see today always place the manger in a stable with animals all around, but there’s no mention of either a stable or animals in the biblical accounts. Nor would shepherds, wise men or any other males have been permitted to visit the baby and his mother soon after a birth. According to the Jewish purity laws, which would have been strictly observed in such a community, the new mother would have been supported only by women, and the men would have been kept at a distance.
